In this episode, we talk about the Islamophobe, Sam Harris, and the double standard when it comes to criticism of Islam. We also talk about why it's so hard to criticize Islam without being accused of racism, and why we should all be more critical of racism in general. And we discuss why we need to stop being selfish and focus on the real issues going on around the world, like women's right to drive and the anti-colonialism that goes on in Saudi Arabia, and how we can all learn to be a little more thoughtful about them. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings Records, and our ad music was made by Micah Vellian. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our other shows on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, and The Anthropology, wherever you get your listening pleasure. If you like what you're listening to, please consider leaving us a five star rating and review on iTunes. We'll be looking out for your feedback in the comments section below! Thank you so much for all the support, and we'll do our best to make the world a better place for you to listen to more of your favourite podcasters, friends and podcasters. Thank you for listening and supporting the podcasters! Timestamps: 5 stars, 5 stars and 5 stars is much more than you can manage to get us out there on the airwaves. - thank you for your support of the pod? 5 stars 6 stars, and a review is much appreciated. 7 stars, a review 8 stars, 6 stars 9 stars, 10 stars, please spread the word out there about this podcast. 11 stars, thank you, and all the best, bye bye bye, bye, good vibes, good day to you, bye and good morning, bye - bye bye. bye bye! - bye - mccartee, bye Bye Bye Bye bye bye - - your continued support, good night, bye karmy x bye, mga Love ya. Cheers, your day, bye , bye bye - Sarah <________ - MRS. Maura, - EJ & JUICY
00:00:18.000It's a very dangerous irony and double standard.
00:00:23.000It's one of the most disturbing phenomena, I think, ever.
00:00:30.000For folks tuning in on Ustream, just to keep you up to date, we were talking about how you can make fun of Christianity with no problems whatsoever.
00:01:13.000This combination of white guilt and political correctness and just sheer Stockholm Syndrome in some people that has made it impossible to criticize Islam without being branded a racist.
00:01:26.000And Islam, if you're not going to buy traditional, then conservative.
00:01:30.000If you're not going to buy conservative, then extremist.
00:01:32.000There's some version of Islam that is the most odious ideology operative now.
00:01:39.000It is leading directly to the immiseration of millions of people.
00:01:44.000And the moment you try to really draw a straight line and Myriad straight lines exist between that phenomenon and the actual doctrine of Islam.
00:01:56.000The actual idea said, handed down from Muhammad, you're accused of bigotry and you're put right next to Michelle Bachman and anyone else on the right who obviously you can't ally with in any sense.
00:02:09.000So it's very troubling because you have...
00:02:15.000Those whole websites and magazines like Salon and Alternet and even The Nation, they just reflexively demonize anyone who has said anything about Islam, the religion, that's negative.
00:02:27.000And it's a double standard we're going to have to overcome.
00:03:46.000And that people everywhere are the same and want the same things.
00:03:48.000And if we just got our act together on the world stage, if we just ceased to exploit people and we ceased to be selfish and we just pulled back all the drones, everyone would behave the same way.
00:04:01.000We would have rational actors everywhere.
00:04:03.000And there's just no evidence for that.
00:04:05.000And there's just as much evidence as you could possibly want to find for the antithesis, which is there are some people who are in a death cult We have to win a war of ideas and we have to win a
00:04:35.000war and we have to be honest about it.
00:05:01.000If 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.
00:05:16.000So if, at best, they're behind us by whatever, 50 years, 75 years in certain social epiphanies.
00:05:26.000So if you roll back the clock in the U.S. and look at racism, we don't really have the same analogous religious brainwashing, but if you look at racism in the U.S., I mean, what was going on in the teens and 20s and 30s is just unthinkable now.
00:05:43.000I mean, just lynchings and newspaper editorials that were starkly racist.
00:05:48.000I mean, there are newspaper editorials, not op-eds, but actually the editorial of the New York Times and the LA Times in 1910, 1915, that read exactly like a KKK pamphlet.
00:06:05.000At 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.
00:06:22.000So when someone draws a cartoon in the Prophet Muhammad and people start burning embassies, the move on our side can't be to apologize for cartooning and to become self-critical and masochistic about, you know, why is it that we had these cartoonists that did this terrible thing?
00:06:55.000We practice self-censorship to a degree that is just astonishing and really just harmful to this conflict, both the hot and cold conflict that we're having.
00:07:11.000It's a caricature of overblown reaction that you get from someone that maybe is put in a situation where they want to always use this as an excuse for why things are.
00:08:07.000And no one's willing to admit that, of course, everyone believes the other people are in a cult.
00:08:11.000But just the cognitive dissonance involved in picking some ancient ideology and thinking at some point in time, Somebody actually had a conversation with the divine, wrote it down verbatim, and it's perfect, and it's never been touched by the hand of man or distorted.
00:08:27.000It's weird that you get that from something like Salon.
00:08:30.000And that's essentially what they're doing by calling you Islamophobic.
00:08:32.000They're endorsing this idea that this wacky cult that makes you kill people, they draw a picture of their guy.
00:08:46.000Sure, that's the most extreme faction of that religion, and there's many people that are moderate Muslims who despise that as much as we do.
00:08:59.000Well, 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.
00:09:09.000So the people who would brand me as an Islamophobe would say that This behavior has nothing to do with Islam, in principle.
00:09:16.000One, you have extremists in every religion and they all misbehave, or bad people will do bad things anyway, and religion is always a pretext.
00:09:28.000The 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.
00:09:46.000You know, the quarterback of the football team can become a jihadist given the right ideas.
00:09:52.000And if you just admit to yourself that certain people actually believe in paradise, And believe that there's a specific way to get there that entails violent defense of the faith, then it becomes totally rational to behave this way.
00:10:08.000Then you and I would be flying planes into buildings if we actually believe this.
00:10:11.000It doesn't matter what other opportunities you have in life.
00:10:14.000And the thing that most secular liberals can't get their minds around is that people actually believe in paradise.
00:10:21.000People actually believe that a certain book was dictated by the creator of the universe and it has provided a blueprint I think we're good to go.
00:10:48.000Fighting the infidel and subjugating the infidel and killing apostates.
00:10:52.000So if you convert to Islam now on this show and then by the end of the show say, I thought better of it.
00:10:58.000I don't feel like being a Muslim anymore.
00:11:26.000Or repeatedly—he has to be an obnoxious apostate.
00:11:29.000But what you don't get are— Millions and millions of Muslims who belong to some bona fide tradition of Islam who say, oh, no, apostasy is fine.
00:11:41.000You should be free to change your mind about the faith.
00:11:45.000And 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.
00:12:13.000And for magazines like Salon to pretend that...
00:12:19.000Killing apostates has no connection to the real religion of Islam.
00:12:24.000It's just pure delusion and it's a dangerous one.
00:12:28.000It's also dangerous just to have a very strict ideology, to have a thing that not just you're supposed to do because the culture wants you to do it, but because God wants you to.
00:12:43.000If you think that in 2013, with the kind of access to information we have, that we really believe that someone actually wrote this stuff down from the divine...
00:13:29.000That 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.
00:13:49.000So 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.
00:14:06.000If that's your religion, well then you're never going to show up on anyone's radar as a dangerous person.
00:14:15.000It's just the main religions on offer don't have those kinds of ideas.
00:14:23.000You know, they have first century and Iron Age platitudes and strictures that have now been canonized in these books and there's no way to rewrite the books.
00:14:37.000People 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.
00:15:37.000You can cherry pick it a little bit, but you can't cherry pick it in quite the same way.
00:15:40.000You can't just take Jesus and half his moods the way you can as a Christian and say, well, it's all about turning the other cheek and I've got I don't care about hell.
00:15:48.000I don't care about any of these culture war issues.
00:15:52.000You just can't, you really can't do that with Islam.
00:16:20.000In their belief, like, childlike in their approach to religion.
00:16:23.000Like, my wife has a friend who's a Mormon.
00:16:25.000I went out to dinner with her and her husband, and somewhere along the line, the subject of higher power came up, and she was grilling me, like, do you believe in a higher power?
00:16:34.000And, you know, basically I said, well, I don't not believe.
00:16:53.000She had this childlike, narrow tunnel of thinking that she prescribed to.
00:17:00.000Ex-Mormons are awesome because there's...
00:17:03.000There's no group of people that are more energetic in their atheism that I've met than ex-Mormons because they're coming out of this thing that is just so obviously made up.
00:17:14.000It's like you got Joseph Smith as a dowser and a con man and just getting it on with everyone's wife and making up the principles.
00:17:25.000He gets new revelations to appease his jealous wife.
00:17:28.000He goes into the closet and God tells him that he's got to have more hot girls.
00:17:35.000It's just there in the floodlights of history to be inspected.
00:17:40.000Once they get out of it and they see that they're trailing all this nonsense, they're very fun to talk to.
00:17:48.000What is it about people that we need, or some people need that?
00:18:14.000What it all means in light of the fact that it all apparently ends is really a defense against grief.
00:18:23.000These beliefs, a belief in paradise, is really the only thing you can tell yourself or tell another person or tell your child in the presence of death that makes death fundamentally unproblematic.
00:18:38.000The closest person to you in your life has died or your child has died.
00:18:43.000So what are you going to say to yourself or to the people around you?
00:18:47.000What can they say to you that is just not only takes the sting out slightly, but it's just perfectly consoling, if you could believe it.
00:18:56.000It'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.
00:19:05.000And all you have to do is believe the right things in the meantime.
00:19:10.000And not screw up too badly as a homosexual or whatever else is on the checklist of don'ts.
00:19:17.000And you will get there and you'll be reunited with everyone you care about.
00:19:22.000And there is no secular or atheist or rational alternative to that.
00:19:29.000And that's a bullet I think we just have to bite.
00:19:34.000At the graveside of a child The atheist doesn't have something to say that says, this is not a problem.
00:19:45.000And 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,
00:20:01.000and there's no question that it relieves that suffering.
00:20:05.000Now, I think it comes with a host of other problems that even that trade-off is not worth it.
00:20:16.000Even if we grant that a certain kind of suffering is relieved there, There's other kinds of suffering that spring up.
00:20:24.000People are not learning how to grieve.
00:20:27.000They're not learning how to teach their children to grieve.
00:20:30.000They're not learning intellectual honesty.
00:20:35.000And they're mired in a way of thinking that is causing them constantly to collide with reality.
00:20:44.000In unfortunate ways, they actually don't get what they want in life because they're believing things that just don't line up with how the world works.
00:20:56.000If you look closely, you can see that even that, the baby in the bathwater of faith, is still dysfunctional.
00:21:07.000The Mormon friend, she applied for a real estate license?
00:21:27.000Meanwhile, not looking at the fact that she's rich as fuck, lives in a great house, has healthy kids.
00:21:31.000There's all this wonderful stuff going on in your life.
00:21:33.000Maybe you just didn't apply yourself enough to this whole real estate thing.
00:21:35.000It's nothing to do with God failing you.
00:21:37.000Do you think that religion is something that's allowing human beings to make this jump from animals to enlightened, connected beings?
00:21:48.000It seems to me that with the connection that we're enjoying through technology, through the internet, and through the access of information, It seems to me that we're slowly but surely dissolving all the boundaries between people and information.
00:22:04.000And we're gonna have much more truth about life and death and the very origins of the universe in a hundred years or a thousand years than we had a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago.
00:22:15.000And I always wonder if, like, religion is something that's allowed us to keep our shit together just long enough for some really fucking smart dudes to figure out the internet.
00:22:27.000Give these fucking crazy apes some sort of an excuse or a reason to live so they don't just go marauding and jump off clips out of despair and give them something that allows them to continue the work and that work being society ultimately Moving towards some sort of technological innovation zero point.
00:22:51.000You know, like everything we do, whether it's cell phones or laptops or cars, every year it's better.
00:23:04.000We don't ever have to make another cell phone again.
00:23:05.000We're going to continue to move forward, faster speeds, more connections, more apps, more things that they can do, holograms, time travel, whatever the fuck it's going to be.
00:23:17.000Sometimes I wonder if what religion is is just like some sort of a scaffolding that lets us build society on.
00:23:25.000Yeah, I actually don't view it that way.
00:23:27.000There are people who think that religion paid evolutionary dividends because it allowed large groups of people, large groups of dimly related people, not just family, but larger tribes, to cohere in a way that they couldn't otherwise.
00:23:44.000So the way to get a bunch of strangers to cohere is to put a big idol in the corner and say, you know, anyone who trespasses the god is going to be killed.
00:23:55.000And we're going to commit a sacrifice of a few kids every month or so and keep everyone in line.
00:24:03.000And outsiders who come into our world who don't understand our taboos and our precepts are going to be easily recognizable as outsiders.
00:24:13.000And so there's a long list of things that people think religion may have given our ancestors.
00:24:20.000I happen to think that most of what explains religion is just more fundamental cognitive and emotional mechanisms that have nothing in principle to do with religion and which have also given us science and reason and everything else that is recognizable as human cognition.
00:24:42.000I think the most rudimentary piece here is belief formation.
00:24:46.000You and I and every other human being who is neurologically intact has learned, comes into this world equipped to represent reality in language and to trade in those representations and to give them credence to one or another degree.
00:25:10.000My belief in the language got me here.
00:25:12.000If I thought that I had transcribed the address wrong, that belief would have caused me to call you and make sure I got the address.
00:25:20.000These are all just ones and zeros in our computer at the moment, but virtually the totality of our worldview is linguistically mediated in this way.
00:25:36.000Everything is not a matter of direct sensory perception in each moment.
00:25:43.000It'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.
00:25:58.000What's the most important thing to live for?
00:26:03.000I think actually reason can capture all of those conversations as well as in the process of doing it.
00:26:11.000It 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.
00:26:22.000And the problem with faith is that it really operates as the permission people give one another to believe things strongly without evidence.
00:26:31.000And we don't give that permission in any other area of our lives.
00:26:34.000We don't give that permission in science.
00:26:36.000In politics, insofar as we're practicing politics that anyone can tolerate.
00:27:17.000They're only private if there's nothing in your life or in the environment that is calling them out.
00:27:23.000But the moment that they are relevant to your behavior, they can't help but inform your behavior insofar as you actually believe them.
00:27:33.000This is an example I gave in In one of my books, a true belief in the efficacy of prayer is dangerous.
00:27:45.000Insofar as you really believe it, you're going to be tempted to rely on prayer.
00:27:49.000You're going to be tempted to rely on prayer for your children.
00:27:51.000You've got these people who won't take their children to doctors because they think prayer is going to work.
00:27:57.000Imagine if you had a pilot who's trying to land the plane with prayer.
00:28:02.000I mean, it's clear that – I mean, it's a ridiculous example because we think no one would ever do that.
00:28:07.000But in some sense, people do that in situations where the stakes are just as high.
00:28:12.000And certainly everyone who's waging jihad thinks that their belief in paradise is true.
00:28:19.000And it's the credence they give to that – It's just pure language in the mind that is so dangerous.
00:28:27.000Did religion ever play an important function in society?
00:28:32.000Did it ever allow people to get past the barbarian ways and apply some sort of moral and ethical rules to society?
00:28:40.000Did it ever have any function or any positive benefit that maybe wouldn't have come about if people were just a bunch of savage tribal people?
00:28:48.000Well, yeah, you can say that it did, but I look at it from the other side.
00:28:53.000So, for instance, when you say that when you look at all the good things Christians have done under the ages of Christianity, occasionally you can point to something in the doctrine of Christianity that seems to be the operative variable.
00:29:13.000So if that doctrine were different, behavior would be different.
00:29:16.000But for the most part, What you see is just people being people trying to get what they want out of life.
00:29:22.000They're building bridges and they're learning about disease and they're trying to develop scientific principles.
00:29:31.000And it just so happens they're all Christians doing this.
00:29:37.000Christianity doesn't really get credit for the birth of science.
00:29:39.000It shouldn't get credit for the birth of science.
00:29:41.000It shouldn't get credit for all the bridges we built or the roads we paved.
00:29:47.000It's just there was no one else to do the job in Europe.
00:29:53.000Everyone 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.
00:30:04.000I mean, it's just as true to say that virtually everyone who ever fought a war or saved a life or built a bridge did it in complete ignorance of Darwinian evolution, right?
00:30:19.000That doesn't mean that ignorance of Darwinian evolution was the crucial variable there or was a good thing or something we should want to promote or something we should safeguard.
00:30:31.000It just so happens that prior to 1859, this notion of evolution was not an idea that had appeared in anyone's head.
00:30:42.000There was no alternative but to not know anything about evolution.
00:30:47.000You could draw a line from ancient Greece.
00:30:55.000And 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.
00:31:08.000Plato could have given us the basis to think rationally about the good life and Plato and everyone like him in ancient Greece.
00:31:17.000And 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.
00:31:36.000So I don't think it's actually – even if religion has seemed to do it in certain circumstances, I don't think it was actually a necessary piece.
00:31:45.000I think we are so deeply wired as social creatures to care about ethics that ethics was going to show up anyway.
00:31:53.000So Christian ethics was not – just Christian and Jewish and Muslim ethics were not – We're good to go.
00:32:27.000Other chimps who are not part of their tribe, if they happen to outnumber them, and that is a behavior that clearly tribalistic, xenophobic violence is clearly something we are good at and do reflexively in a state of nature.
00:32:51.000We overcome that by extending the circle of our morality and extending our relationships, our economic relationships, our cultural relationships,
00:33:07.000our peaceful collaboration with strangers.
00:33:40.000You don't feel empathy for other people.
00:33:43.000You either don't care that you make them suffer or you actually take sadistic pleasure in making them suffer.
00:33:55.000The very basis for trust breaks down in relation to such a person.
00:34:01.000And 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,
00:34:20.000but put them into a system of poorly aligned incentives and bad ideas, and they essentially act like psychopaths.
00:34:29.000The guy who got on the bus and shot Malala in the head for wanting to go to school, that's essentially what happened.
00:34:38.000A Taliban gunman Tried to assassinate a 15-year-old girl for the crime of wanting to get an education.
00:34:48.000Most people look at that and think, well, he must have been a psychopath or he must have been crazy.
00:34:55.000And I think the situation we're in is far more sinister than that.
00:35:00.000He very likely was a perfectly normal person and very likely a father who thought he was doing a good thing.
00:35:09.000And 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.
00:35:34.000It was not that there were hundreds of thousands of psychopaths eager to collaborate in the destruction of a people.
00:35:40.000There were a lot of normal people who, given the requisite ideas and the requisite incentives, And the ability, as you described, to dehumanize the other just saw no problem.
00:35:54.000They 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.
00:36:09.000Now, obviously, there are some people who were racked by guilt and some people who refused to collaborate, but this is one of the scary features of the human mind.
00:36:17.000It's possible to be an otherwise good person and do horrible things in the right situation.
00:36:25.000That'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.
00:36:42.000I agree with you, but I don't think there's any evidence that this guy was like a normal, nice guy in everyday life.
00:36:48.000I just don't understand why you would assume he was.
00:36:50.000I would assume that if everyone knew that she was going to school and there were so many people that knew, it would take an extreme version of that ideology in order to get on a bus and shoot a 15-year-old girl.
00:37:07.000I 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.
00:37:25.000There's no reason to believe that and there are many reasons to believe otherwise.
00:37:29.000And you can just look at how people get radicalized and it's not...
00:37:36.000You don't have to round up all the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world and brainwash them and turn them loose.
00:37:44.000They're far more functional people than that.
00:37:46.000Isn't that what we do when we train troops?
00:38:29.000Amped up because we're not used to it and we see someone in tears with a major wound or a broken arm and all of our empathy circuits kick in and we're not very useful in that circumstance.
00:38:42.000I mean, leave aside for the moment that we actually don't know what to do.
00:38:47.000Even if we did know what to do, the An efflux of empathy in that moment is not especially useful.
00:38:55.000To 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.
00:39:11.000There's even a point of contact between that ability just to shut out the other human stuff and deal with the machine That is on a continuum with this cognitive, emotional gesture of dehumanizing The other.
00:39:29.000And just seeing no moral implication in just blowing up bodies.
00:39:35.000So it's essentially you're talking about a broad spectrum of possibilities of the way the mine operates.
00:39:39.000And there's some people that can learn how to shut things off.
00:39:42.000And that's what you're doing when you're a soldier.
00:39:44.000You just learn how to, this is your new reality.
00:39:47.000There was an article recently where they interviewed that guy who was a soldier who got in trouble because he was urinating on a dead insurgent.
00:39:56.000And they interviewed him, and it was really interesting because he was very honest about how he felt about the situation.
00:40:03.000He said that people have this idea of what they want out of a Marine.
00:40:08.000They want a guy who's on the commercial, who slides the sword into the holster or the scabbard and stands up straight and is wearing a perfectly trimmed suit.
00:40:17.000You don't want a guy who's going to piss on a dead guy.
00:40:20.000But you don't get one without the other.
00:40:49.000There's a thing about sexuality that I always found really odd.
00:40:51.000You can't watch sex, but you can watch graphic violence.
00:40:55.000You can put a movie, and if it's sex, there's legs covering, there's angles, and you don't ever see genitals, except it's very brief, and there's no actual intercourse.
00:41:04.000We're not allowed to show intercourse.
00:41:06.000Intercourse is somehow or another ridiculously taboo.
00:41:09.000But we can watch people's heads explode on regular television.
00:42:49.000It's easy to see why that would start to get drummed out of you.
00:42:54.000It's a huge problem that we can dehumanize other people.
00:43:00.000It's also a huge problem that we can be part of systems and collaborate in ways which effectively We don't even have the mechanism by which we would notice it.
00:43:15.000We just don't see that there is kind of a zero-sum game here operating in the background, which we are all, we can't help but participate in, which leaves people trying to eke out their survival from trash heaps in developing nations,
00:43:34.000and you and I wondering whether we should get the iPad Air.
00:43:39.000And there's no way to really square, in a moral, ethical sense, The way we use our attention in that space.
00:43:49.000There'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,
00:44:06.000while that's a good thing to do, It's this sort of telescopic philanthropy where there's not a real connection.
00:44:15.000When 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,
00:44:33.000It never shows up in my mind or in my conversation with anyone else as a shocking misuse of my resources.
00:44:49.000I'm sketching a series of thought experiments that people like the philosopher Peter Singer and Peter Unger have put in What we all seem to justify to ourselves by default is living in a way where we care about our own happiness to a much,
00:45:17.000much greater degree than we could possibly justify in the presence of someone else's abject suffering.
00:45:25.000And because we're not in the presence, I mean, if after this podcast you and I walk out onto the sidewalk and see someone starving to death in front of us, a child starving to death, we wouldn't be able to ignore it.
00:45:40.000Clearly, it's our responsibility to figure out, you know, we have to call the authorities, we have to get some food, we have to get a blanket, we have to do something.
00:45:48.000But because it's happening in another society and the only evidence of it that is being thrust in our face at this moment is an appeal by email or a letter, just hitting delete doesn't strike us as analogous to stepping over the body of a child on the sidewalk and saying it's not our problem.
00:46:09.000And really, in a global It is analogous, and yet we don't have the mechanisms in place to make it friction-free for us to feel the imperative and care about suffering elsewhere.
00:46:27.000Clearly, we have to figure out how to do that as a species.
00:46:36.000You look at the amount of people in Africa that have AIDS. You look at the amount of people in third world countries that are struggling to find food every day.
00:47:12.000There's this diffusion of responsibility that comes in large numbers that allows people to ignore a rape if there's a hundred people around and not if there's one.
00:47:23.000Watch people get robbed in Times Square and not do anything about it because they're surrounded by other people and they're waiting for someone else to make a move.
00:47:37.000Well, actually, to segue to questions of self-defense, I think that that diffusion of responsibility idea has been oversold because I think more of what's going on for people is they don't want to be the first one to get stabbed.
00:47:53.000In many of those situations, you've got somebody with a weapon.
00:48:01.000And especially in the original case, the Kitty Genovese case, where that notion of diffusion of responsibility was coined, you had a guy with a knife stabbing a woman to death on a sidewalk over the course of many minutes, and there were many witnesses.
00:48:17.000But the problem from the point of view of the herd is the first guy to rush The guy with the knife is very likely going to get stabbed and terribly injured or killed.
00:48:33.000But if five people rushed him at the same time, if there was some sort of, you know, tactical intelligence in the group, very likely he could be taken down and neutralized and that would, you know, Maybe someone would still get hurt, but it's not going to be like one guy after the other getting a fatal stabbing.
00:48:54.000It's a problem we have in that people are frozen.
00:49:02.000I mean, we don't have the knowledge tactically among untrained people that if you all go in at once, you have a very good shot at bringing down even a very scary-looking guy.
00:49:17.000If you hit him low and I hit him high and another person hits him in the middle...
00:49:23.000If he's got three 180-pound guys hitting him, we're going to bring him down.
00:49:33.000Obviously, if we have training, that's all the more likely, but what we need in situations like that are people who Are going to take responsibility for the safety of others.
00:49:44.000The 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.
00:50:01.000Well, in this soft society that we have, our society is so soft and nice, and it's the easiest society that's ever existed.
00:50:09.000There's not a lot of conflict in people's lives, and new things like conflict are terrifying, especially physical conflict with another human being who wants to hurt you.
00:50:18.000I've told this story on the podcast, but I'll tell it again for you.
00:50:21.000I was watching a guy who was at the comedy store, and there was two guys arguing, and they were in the middle of the street across from the House of Blues, and They started arguing.
00:50:33.000And they started swinging at each other.
00:50:35.000And it was a white guy and a black guy.
00:50:37.000And the white guy just went into full panic mode and was literally standing square and just flailing, closing his eyes with his open hands flailing.
00:50:48.000And then a bus pulled in front and I couldn't see him anymore.
00:50:50.000And then as soon as the bus moved, he was unconscious.
00:51:57.000But I think we all have the sense that if something starts going down on an airplane, We're all going to rush the guy and there's just going to be no hesitation because we know how bad that can turn out.
00:52:13.000I think that attitude could be brought down to ground level.
00:52:18.000And 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...
00:53:38.000And it's not that it is rational to be the first person to run away.
00:53:44.000It's not that that's bad advice for the person.
00:53:49.000It's probably advice that we should all take if our only concern is to avoid violence wherever it appears.
00:53:57.000There are situations where you're going to want to do that no matter who you are.
00:54:02.000If 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.
00:54:10.000That's the moment for you to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
00:54:14.000And that may be true even if you're a cop.
00:54:18.000You have to rank order your priorities and do it very quickly.
00:54:24.000I just think that there's an ethic that we could have much more of in this society.
00:54:30.000It would certainly be tuned up by martial arts training in many more people, but it could just be tuned up even without the training, that things are a lot worse when you give the bad guy endless freedom to move.
00:54:47.000And there are very few bad guys, even armed bad guys, who can deal with a crowd And so when these things go down in public and you have a natural crowd, if everyone's just running away or clinging to the exits, it's very different than if we all took the responsibility of being the first to take them down.
00:55:09.000I think that martial arts should be taught in school the same way we teach writing, the same way we teach math.
00:56:57.000And they might get tapped still, but at least they're going to do what they have to do to try their best to get out of that situation.
00:57:04.000I think that martial arts, for men especially, and I think for women too, I shouldn't even say men especially, I obviously don't know what it's like to be a woman, but...
00:57:12.000I think for men, it's a critical part of developing your personality.
00:57:15.000Not because you should be fighting people, not because you should be...
00:57:18.000I think people need to do difficult things to explore their character.
00:57:22.000I think it's important for human beings.
00:57:26.000I think we'd want to distinguish between or among the martial arts because I think there are martial arts that tune up the wrong part of the ego because you're actually not ever...
00:57:40.000Having your skills confirmed or disconfirmed because it's all in this domain of fantasy and pantomimes of violence.
00:57:51.000We have this cooperative exchange of attacks and replies to the attacks where you're not actually fighting.
00:57:59.000You're not actually poking the person in the eye and seeing what happens or getting poked in the eye.
00:58:04.000This is sort of the cut between You know, what are either the fantasy-based martial arts or the so-called realistic, you know, self-defense martial arts and something like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu where you're really – you're pressure testing it 100%.
00:58:23.000Now, I think there are – Pathologies to the sport pressure testing as well.
00:58:31.000I think you have to get a very clear view of what works in the world.
00:58:35.000You have to be an intelligent consumer of all these things.
00:58:38.000But there is something toxic about training in an art where you're always left wondering whether it works.
00:58:53.000The feeling that you might have something to prove and the fear of being someone who couldn't actually prove it and that whole paranoia that happens in a school where you have teachers whose skills are by definition never tested.
00:59:07.000The black belt sensei never is going to roll with his students in these arts.
00:59:12.000All he's doing is walking around teaching his fantasy techniques.
00:59:17.000The students wouldn't be comfortable wrestling him to the ground and sweating.
00:59:23.000You have this hierarchy that is never You just imagine that the guy's got mad skills, but they're never demonstrated in a way that is other than maybe he can do some very pretty kicks,
00:59:38.000but he's not actually fighting anyone.
01:00:50.000There's benefits to that because you learn really incredible leg dexterity and some of the best kickers ever are Taekwondo guys who eventually learn Muay Thai, kickboxing, boxing, and wrestling.
01:00:58.000There's a lot of guys in the UFC now that are super effective with those techniques.
01:01:03.000But when you start training with kickboxers, you just get beat up.
01:02:26.000It's probably true for anyone, but it's especially true if you've come from a background in martial arts where you think you have some skills.
01:03:37.000And it was just this most surreal experience of making a 100% effort to survive and failing every 30 seconds or minute and a half and just then being resurrected by just the sheer fact that he decided not to kill me.
01:05:10.000He's like, my friend, look out for your arm!
01:05:12.000He jokes around with you as he's rolling with you.
01:05:15.000But the technical aspect of jiu-jitsu is very overlooked to people who don't participate in it because it's weird when you're looking at it.
01:05:24.000It's just a bunch of guys swimming around on the ground.
01:05:58.000And it's one of the few martial arts where the little man really can defeat the bigger, stronger man easily.
01:06:04.000And there's a lot of that fantasy martial arts that you were talking about, where there's people that have the death touch and they can...
01:06:10.000You see those videos online where guys throw their hand at people and they fall to the ground.
01:06:14.000And you've got to wonder what's going on, whether the person's helping out and they're falling to the ground on purpose, or whether they really believe they get zapped with some chi.
01:06:22.000But when you see a guy like Hoist Gracie defeat a guy like Ken Shamrock or defeat a guy like the old school Dan Severin, when he caught him in that triangle, off his back he taps him.
01:07:18.000In principle, all grappling is that, and all joint locks added to grappling, I guess, is that.
01:07:25.000But Brazilian jiu-jitsu is, I think, if you're just going to take the off-the-shelf solution to that suite of problems where you've got two people trying to dominate one another physically, and you want to do it in a way where The violence is truly incremental.
01:07:44.000You can turn it up as slowly as the laws of physics allow.
01:08:51.000You were talking about your instructor not quite believing in him.
01:08:56.000Eddie Bravo has a great story of a guy that he was training under before he found jiu-jitsu that was doing one of those sort of multiple art-based systems.
01:09:04.000He had like, you know, five black belts in different arts.
01:09:07.000And he told everyone he was going to China to train.
01:09:11.000You know, he had a great master in China that he was going to train.
01:09:14.000And Eddie went to the supermarket, and he recognized the guy's car.
01:09:18.000And so he goes inside, and the guy was shopping.
01:09:43.000Offers the challenge and then gets punched in the nose by this very ordinary-looking martial artist.
01:09:49.000That one's sad, but they're just mesmerizing to watch.
01:09:53.000The ones where there is no disconfirmation, there's just the cult in full splendor, and you just have everyone complying with this magic touch.
01:10:04.000I mean, even at distances of 20 feet, you've got people writhing in pain and flopping around.
01:10:19.000There's a sort of hypnotic component to it and a suggestibility and also social pressure and self-deception and just many things get conspired to make people participate in this thing.
01:10:37.000Seemingly the most delusional thing that has ever happened.
01:10:40.000Explain it to people who have no idea what we're talking about.
01:12:07.000But then you see his challenge match and he clearly did not know that he couldn't do this because otherwise he never would have issued that challenge.
01:12:18.000But you can imagine, what if you open a school and for the next 30 years everyone cooperates with you?
01:12:25.000So you've never met someone who wouldn't fall down.
01:12:28.000To your magic touch, you could see how he would believe this.
01:12:33.000He's basically run a psychological experiment on himself and brainwashed himself in the presence of all these compliant students.
01:12:41.000But anyways, challenge match is somewhat depressing, but also It's also pretty satisfying to see a mass delusion disconfirmed that emphatically.
01:12:53.000I mean, this is what you want to see go down with religion.
01:12:56.000The problem is the religion really is tennis without the net.
01:13:00.000I mean, there's no disconfirmation that is so clear that the religious person is going to accept it, whereas this guy...
01:13:09.000Getting repeatedly punched in the face, he has to accept that he's lost the fight.
01:14:34.000The perfect look, the perfect window at what the human mind is capable of.
01:14:40.000The fact that human minds can do this proves that religion can be every bit as delusional as atheists say it is, or at least the doctrines about the afterlife and all the garish stuff that we think of in terms of religion.
01:14:59.000It'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.
01:15:42.000It's not something everyone can be the Manchurian candidate.
01:15:48.000There's clearly a phenomenon where you can be inducted into a state where you're given suggestions which then are operative at the level of your behavior and emotion and about which you may have no recollection.
01:16:38.000Just the sunk cost of how much time you've spent doing this thing, whether it's religion or a fake martial art, the pressure, the emotional pressure not to realize it's bullshit can be excruciating.
01:16:53.000One of my favorite conversations with a former person of faith that I've ever had was I met someone at dinner who had lost her faith that day.
01:17:07.000Just 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.
01:17:27.000The sunk cost of it, because she had spent decades fixating on this stuff, and it had We're good to go.
01:17:54.000And all the things she could have done with that time.
01:17:58.000That is a wall that many people just can't clear because it's just too painful to acknowledge.
01:18:50.000Of all the ones that are avoidable, when you just look at how people screw up their lives, lying is, if it's not the reason, it's the thing that enabled the other reason.
01:19:03.000People complicate their lives massively by A willingness to deceive others.
01:19:14.000One is just there are all the things you can do based on The cover that lies provide that you shouldn't be doing because they're not good for you and everyone would hate you if they knew you were doing them or your wife would leave you or whatever it is.
01:19:31.000The lies create a space in which you can let your life run off the rails, whether it's becoming an addict or Or perpetrating financial frauds or whatever it is.
01:19:46.000But there's also this component where you never actually discover who you are in social space if you always leave yourself this out of line.
01:19:59.000If you keep canceling plans with people and just tell this white lie that you're too busy or you're not feeling well, you never have to confront the fact that These are people you actually don't want to see.
01:20:10.000You've got people in your life who want to go out to dinner with you.
01:20:14.000You 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.
01:20:26.000There'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.
01:20:34.000You're just getting into the future without screwing it up for yourself.
01:20:40.000There's no more important change than a commitment to being honest in whatever the situation is that presents itself.
01:20:46.000So you don't fake it till you make it?
01:20:55.000Well, you can fake something until you make it, which is you can fake a positive attitude toward uncertainty.
01:21:03.000So you can go into a situation without any guarantee that it's going to work out or that you're going to develop the skills that you need or that people are going to like you, but have a positive attitude.
01:21:18.000I mean, it's sort of a goodwill toward the future that you can develop, and that is a kind of...
01:21:24.000I mean, it's faking confidence and faking comfort, maybe.
01:21:29.000Lying is when you are intentionally...
01:21:37.000It's planting false beliefs in others when they expect the truth.
01:21:42.000Being a card magician or being a poker player, this is not lying.
01:21:48.000The deception I'm talking about is when someone has every reason to expect the truth, and you are purporting to give the truth, but you're not, and you're actually deceiving them.
01:22:02.000What I focus on in the book, because virtually everyone recognizes that some subset of deceptions are a problem.
01:22:11.000The egregious lies, the frauds that really harm people, and the lies that when a pharmaceutical company says the drug works and they're lying, everyone recognizes that that's a problem, that we've all paid a huge price for The skepticism we now have about governments and corporations,
01:22:31.000because whenever we catch them in a lie, we just now, for the next 10 years, can't forget that these people in power often lie to us.
01:22:43.000There's another set of lies that people think are actually unavoidable or good, and they're usually called white lies.
01:22:57.000I think the price we pay for white lies is also excruciating, and it's not something that people are quick to see.
01:23:05.000Actually, I didn't see it until I went to When I was a freshman at Stanford, I took a course with a professor who I actually interview in the back of the book, Ronald Howard, who was really a brilliant guy who started a whole academic field called decision analysis in the 60s,
01:23:22.000and 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.
01:23:39.000It's got nothing to do with lying or honesty, but he's a professor in the Engineering Economic Systems Department at Stanford, and he, as kind of a sideline to his academic work, was teaching these Courses on ethics and one course was just on the question whether it's ever ethical to lie.
01:24:00.000And so as a freshman I was sort of put in the machine of this course and came out the other side convinced that in virtually any situation apart from like a self-defense situation where things have really broken down and you're not in the presence of someone who you're going to collaborate with,
01:24:35.000Like when you were talking to that rabbi that we were talking about earlier, and he has this very eloquent and very theatrical way of communicating.
01:24:45.000It's kind of tricky because when someone's really good at that, You want to believe that they're telling the truth.
01:24:51.000You want to believe that someone who is lying to you in a very charismatic way is telling you the truth.
01:24:57.000Until we actually can read each other's minds, there's a lot of confusion that goes on in human interaction.
01:25:53.000And 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.
01:26:11.000What I'm interested in are the subtle ways that it erodes trust between people because there's one example I use in the book where a friend was out with her girlfriend and she wasn't like her best friend but they were very close friends and the girlfriend had plans later that night with another friend and didn't want to have that plan.
01:26:35.000And so this friend A watches her friend call up the third friend and lie about why she can't have plans.
01:26:43.000And she lied so convincingly and effortlessly.
01:26:46.000It was just something with her kid being sick, whatever it was.
01:27:16.000She was just left with this vague sense that probably this woman had lied to her in the past and would lie to her in the future.
01:27:24.000And we go through life like this with people.
01:27:28.000And the people who are telling these little lies are just...
01:27:32.000So the liar in that case never knew That she had subtly degraded her friendship with the first friend.
01:27:41.000And these things just don't get discovered and it's very toxic.
01:27:45.000I find also that people that lie are very difficult at seeing lies in others.
01:27:49.000Or very bad, rather, at seeing lies in others.
01:27:52.000I think that people who are bullshitters can be bullshitted.
01:27:55.000People who are con artists can be conned.
01:27:57.000There's a There's some sort of a disconnect that people have that don't live in, especially an introspective, really objective version of themselves, like really looking hard at all their issues.
01:28:08.000If you're lying, you're not doing that.
01:28:10.000You might have some walls up that you might not know about, and they could lead to you getting lied to.
01:28:45.000You 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.
01:29:01.000Deception is part of the game and self-deception is part of the game, but in many cases I think you have people who have been They're indoctrinated from birth or get a message from their culture or get emotionally hijacked in ways that allow them to believe the unbelievable.
01:29:22.000And then they're being perfectly honest when they spread those ideas.
01:29:27.000And that, I think, is a different problem.
01:29:32.000Self-deception is certainly a component in many of these cases.
01:29:35.000Do you think it's possible that technology will eventually make lying obsolete?
01:29:39.000What we're seeing right now with this invasion of privacy thing with the NSA, we're seeing it's a one-sided trip, obviously, and then you have WikiLeaks and Eric Snowden.
01:30:27.000I think this NSA thing is fucking terrible.
01:30:29.000I think it's terrible mostly because it's the government that has all the power in this situation.
01:30:36.000It's these people that are not using it.
01:30:38.000I mean, the idea is that they're using it to prevent terrorism.
01:30:42.000I guess maybe, but there's so much evidence that points to the fact they were spying on other world leaders that they didn't think were terrorists.
01:30:49.000It's essentially using it as a vehicle for control.
01:30:52.000But it brings up a fascinating new area of technology, and that is this new era that we're entering into where everything's getting closer and closer and closer to the point where One day,
01:31:07.000we're going to have this one database that we all draw from all the time.
01:31:12.000If we have the internet, we're going to have something that's like a pair of glasses or something that you wear inside your skin or something that's going to allow everybody to be connected all over the place.
01:31:22.000I don't know how we're going to manage it, but all that information, we're going to be able to get to it.
01:31:27.000I'm going to be able to know what you had for lunch today.
01:31:46.000I think there's no question that at some point we are going to have lie detection that may not be perfect, but it will be valid enough and reliable enough that we will rely on it In the way that we rely on DNA evidence.
01:32:03.000So if it was your DNA at the scene, we think you're involved.
01:32:07.000If 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.
01:32:17.000We're certainly not there yet, but I think that It would really surprise me if we don't get there.
01:32:23.000I wanted to talk to you about this because I had one of your colleagues on my show, Joe Rogan Questions Everything.
01:32:36.000And she was talking about fMRI results and how a woman was actually convicted of a murder, I believe it was in India, because of fMRI that she had what they called functional knowledge of the crime scene.
01:33:37.000To say nothing of the fact that we just cannot resolve brain function clearly enough to base those kinds of decisions on a judgment that the person is lying or not.
01:33:52.000We don't understand the neural correlates of Of honesty and deception enough to know.
01:33:57.000But I think it would be very surprising if we never get there.
01:34:10.000Pamela Douglas is the woman I'm thinking of.
01:34:13.000She was a graduate student in the lab I was in at UCLA, and after I did a study of belief, where I compared belief and disbelief and uncertainty with fMRI,
01:34:30.000She 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.
01:34:42.000So what I did is I put subjects in a scanner and I gave them propositions to read that were either clearly true or clearly false or clearly undecidable.
01:34:52.000Just compared belief versus disbelief versus uncertainty.
01:34:55.000And that is, if you could do that at the single trial level, you essentially have a lie detector.
01:35:01.000Because if you believe that you were the person who committed the crime, and we have a Understanding of the neural correlates of belief versus disbelief, then we could easily ask you whether you were involved in a way that would tease that out.
01:35:17.000So 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.
01:35:30.000And her classifiers were over 90% accurate.
01:35:35.000So she was over 90% in In guessing, essentially, whether someone believed or disbelieved a proposition.
01:35:46.000It's easy to see how we would now, with available technology, have a lie detector that was 90% accurate.
01:35:53.000Now, that's not accurate enough to put people away for misstatements in court, but if we could get it to the level of accuracy that we now rely on for DNA evidence, It's an interesting question philosophically and experimentally how we'd ever bridge that gap and how we'd ever be truly confident that no matter what sort of histrionics and protestations,
01:36:23.000Though this person claims on his mother's life that he's telling the truth, the brain scan evidence says otherwise.
01:36:31.000Somehow 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.
01:36:43.000But in principle, I don't see any reason why we couldn't get there.
01:36:46.000And that, I think, would change things a lot.
01:36:48.000Because when you look at the price we pay for not being able to determine whether someone is lying, it is huge.
01:37:07.000There was this one guy whose name is now escaping me, but there was a New Yorker profile on him where his house burned down, and he was charged with the crime of having set the fire and killing his two kids.
01:37:21.000Now, imagine being someone whose house burned down and your two kids die in the fire and the world thinks you did it.
01:37:29.000And 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.
01:37:41.000If we could just tell whether someone was telling the truth, that problem goes away.
01:37:50.000Think of the implications of You know, negotiation among, you know, leaders of countries where you don't know whether people are telling the truth.
01:38:02.000And, you know, we do or do not have nuclear weapons.
01:38:05.000You don't know whether they're telling—if there was transparency at the level of all—for all of those conversations, It would really be a game changer.
01:38:14.000Not only that, women will have to finally accept what men actually think.
01:39:23.000Because if you were self-deceived, if you actually believed what you were saying, but what you're saying is not true, then you could sort of game the system.
01:39:40.000The neural correlates of deception, we wouldn't necessarily be able to detect someone who believed their own lies.
01:39:50.000There may be some way to be confused enough or confabulistic enough about reality that you can just bullshit or spitball or say what you want to be true or kind of hypnotize yourself.
01:40:05.000We just don't actually know what's true At the level of the mind's cognitive elasticity.
01:40:11.000So it's possible that you could have people who are not good subjects of lie detection in some sense.
01:40:18.000And that's something we would understand if we understood all this.
01:40:24.000But I think in the general case, and certainly in the case of big lies, virtually all the time the liar knows he's lying.
01:40:34.000And is hoping not to get caught and is picking his words carefully so as not to get caught and keeping track of the things he said and is consciously calculating against the expectations of cogency and plausibility in his audience.
01:40:54.000I mean, there's a massive calculation going on.
01:40:57.000Virtually all of which is conscious in a liar, and it seems to me that that is going to be detectable with great reliability at some point.
01:41:10.000Everything gets better, and that's something they're working on on a constant basis, whether it's 100 years from now or 200 years from now.
01:41:23.000The fears of the misuse of this or the fears about the Orwellian misuse of this are pretty easy to get a hold of.
01:41:32.000And I think people feel like there's the last and most critical loss of cognitive liberty.
01:41:48.000If you didn't have the A fundamental right to privacy that could be safeguarded by lies.
01:41:58.000Something crucial to our humanity has been lost.
01:42:01.000I think many people will feel that, and it won't matter how high you pile the benefits.
01:42:08.000You talk about the guy who was in prison and killed, and he didn't kill his daughters, but we thought he did and we killed him, and you multiply that guy by 100,000, and you talk about treaties and deceptions at the level of nation states where millions of lives hang in the balance.
01:42:26.000There are people who are going to say, no, no, this is not acceptable.
01:42:29.000And I think they'll have a few points on their side.
01:42:34.000But I think the cost to us personally and economically and socially for consequential lies, I'm not imagining a world where we would have lie detection technology running all the time so that every time you You know, someone says,
01:42:55.000I mean, there's not—I don't think any of us would want to live in that world, but when the stakes are high and conversations matter, even just in court, say, you know, the conversation is important enough and consequential enough that it has now moved into a court,
01:43:12.000and we've got lawyers on both sides, and now we've got people swearing oaths of honesty— Let's have this conversation in a framework where we know that lies will be detected.
01:43:24.000I think any sane person is going to sign up for that.
01:43:29.000Isn't that the progression, though, that's always existed?
01:43:32.000People were resisting books when books were first printed.
01:43:36.000Yeah, because it was going to erode our memory, which it probably did.
01:43:39.000But yeah, they thought that was something crucial to our happiness would be lost by...
01:43:47.000Well, there's a lot of people that also believe going online is bad.
01:43:50.000I've talked to a lot of people that take pride in not going online.
01:45:08.000I mean, that's something that you can, in a very lazy way, just do more times than not.
01:45:15.000And there are now a thousand moments like that that we all confront.
01:45:21.000And if we're not aware of how it's playing with the fabric of our lives, you can just wake up one day with a very fragmented kind of attention and...
01:46:31.000It seems like when the genie's out of the bottle or something like that, once they can do that, and then once they justify doing that, and not all that...
01:46:41.000Obama's been lying about it, like, left and right.
01:46:43.000It's fascinating when you find out that he oversaw a lot of these decisions to spy on people.
01:46:50.000And there's a lot of things that were done during the Bush administration before him that go way back to 2002. Yeah, a German Chancellor confronts Obama about U.S. spying on her cell phone.
01:46:59.000Why would you spy on the German Chancellor?
01:47:04.000Well, no, but we have this history of espionage which In which that is just clearly something you would do.
01:47:12.000One problem here is just that, and this is one of the consequences of increasing transparency, once certain facts are acknowledged People have to respond to them.
01:47:29.000There's a, you know, I know you know, and you know that I know that you know, and now what was essentially an open secret has to be explicitly talked about and reacted to.
01:47:42.000And so everyone knew for decades that we would make every effort we could to spy on everyone we cared about spying on, and that is allies and enemies.
01:47:54.000And everyone did it insofar as their resources allow.
01:47:59.000And that is just what has always happened.
01:48:02.000But the moment you actually put too fine a point on it and declare Angela Merkel's cell phone has been bugged by the NSA or the CIA, that is intolerable.
01:48:39.000We might be defenseless because we would find the act of waging war so unconscionable That we wouldn't do it or we'd be slow enough to do it that we would be, you know, sitting ducks.
01:48:56.000I mean, I just have a big question mark there.
01:48:58.000There are cases in which true information prevents you from being able to do something.
01:49:07.000That you actually would want to do, and perhaps should want to do, to protect people who need to be protected.
01:49:17.000Protect people from the realities of the world that they're not necessarily aware of, that they haven't come to grips with.
01:49:23.000Like, that some people aren't looking for your best interests.
01:49:26.000Some people will shoot a 15-year-old girl on a bus because she wants to read.
01:49:30.000These people are real people, and you're not going to change them.
01:49:32.000You're not going to enlighten them instantaneously unless, you know, that's the next invention.
01:49:37.000Until then, you're going to have to deal with the realities of the world you live in.
01:49:41.000Yeah, so either we should have espionage or we shouldn't.
01:49:46.000Now, a lot of people think there shouldn't be a CIA, there shouldn't be an NSA, there's something...
01:49:51.000Including JFK. Yeah, so it's just, if you're one of those people, if you think we shouldn't be spying on anyone, then obviously anything we do in that sphere is unethical and problematic.
01:50:09.000It's obvious that we want information that people don't want to give us.
01:50:14.000And this is information that relates to the most consequential things that could possibly happen, nuclear terrorism.
01:50:21.000We 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.
01:50:32.000And if there's any way to find out so as to interdict that process, Let's call that espionage, and that's going to be a matter of tapping people's phones or watching their email.
01:50:47.000You just have to imagine how you would feel if a nuke goes off in the port of Los Angeles, killing 150,000 people and making a region of Los Angeles uninhabitable for decades, if not more.
01:51:04.000How would you feel if the NSA said, yeah, we actually had the technology to detect all of those machinations that led to that catastrophe, but we decided not to use it?
01:51:15.000We decided not to use it because Glenn Greenwald made enough noise that it just became politically inconvenient for us to use it, or we were respecting the rights of Of people to, you know, to have private evil thoughts that we weren't good.
01:51:35.000Clearly, the price for that kind of delicacy is too high in the aftermath of that kind of event.
01:51:41.000So if you live in a world where you think that...
01:51:45.000Or 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...
01:51:55.000Then I think you want some level of very energetic eavesdropping on certain people.
01:52:02.000And then the question is just where do you draw the line?
01:53:58.000In that way, it can actually be argued that it was better for the people to have that ruthless dictator in power than it is to have the United States sort of loosely helping them govern themselves.
01:54:08.000I think, you know, ultimately the best thing for everybody would be some sort of a compromise.
01:54:14.000But when you look at the fact that these people are both Muslims, they just have a different sect of Muslim, of Islam, and they kill each other, like on a regular basis.
01:54:23.000Like the amount of slaughter involved.
01:54:25.000Most people don't even know that that's going on.
01:54:40.000People rail against U.S. foreign policy being the engine that's driving this global jihad and Muslim violence.
01:54:49.000You just have to look at what Muslims are doing to other Muslims in contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with our overreaching, our colonialism, our stealing of resources.
01:55:28.000We're talking about, in many cases, the victimization of a religious minority that has no political power.
01:55:35.000It's not the Tea Party really trying to get something.
01:55:41.000This 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.
01:55:59.000Do you think that it's possible to turn that around?
01:56:04.000Or do you think that the reason why you support the United States occupying these countries is because they're so chaotic that you need to keep an eye on them?
01:56:33.000Well, because you look at the consequences of our never having done it before that.
01:56:38.000There was this slow bleed of attacks on us without any real reprisal for decades, since the early 80s.
01:56:50.000And we were, you know, there were hostages in Lebanon and there were, you know, the marine barracks got blown up and the lesson drawn among the jihadists of the world was this is, you know, the West is a paper tiger.
01:57:08.000They're just going to run away and we can keep taking it to them.
01:57:15.000That's not the lesson we want jihadists to draw.
01:57:19.000I think the lesson we want them to draw is that It is very dangerous to be a jihadist.
01:57:26.000If 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.
01:57:37.000I think we have to have a policy toward jihadists, which is a policy of hot war.
01:57:45.000I don't think we should be occupying countries to do this.
01:58:04.000Do you think that the United States, like some secret factions of the United States, have some sort of involvement in profiteering off of drug use?
01:58:27.000What is the margin for stealing it and fighting a war to steal?
01:58:32.000Clearly, if we had ulterior profit-seeking motives in any of these wars, They didn't pan out.
01:58:41.000These wars are so much more costly than anything else we could have gotten from them.
01:58:47.000The lesson I draw from these wars is that there is a consequence to having boots on the ground.
01:58:55.000And 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.
01:59:07.000There's a perception in the Muslim world, some of it is fraudulent and they don't really believe this.
01:59:13.000Some of it is genuinely believed by many, many millions of people that the West is just trying to conquer the Muslim world and destroy this The one true religion.
01:59:26.000That's not a perception that we can just keep humming for a century.
01:59:32.000And one way to deflate it is to treat this all like a, in some sense, like a crime problem, but a crime problem that is going to be remedied with covert I think we should assassinate jihadists.
01:59:56.000And we shouldn't make a big thing about doing this.
01:59:59.000We shouldn't own it every time it happens.
02:00:01.000It just should become clear in 100 countries.
02:00:05.000That if you're a jihadist who sets up shop as the jihadist who's now going to install the global caliphate and kill infidels, your life just got very dangerous.
02:00:21.000But the endgame for us and for a global civilization is to get moderate Muslims to do that job.
02:00:31.000The moderate Muslims have to realize That they need to win a civil war with their jihadists.
02:00:38.000As long as moderate Muslims and conservative Muslims who are not jihadists think that If jihadism is not their problem or they're just scared of their own extremists,
02:00:54.000there's going to be no one else to prosecute this war.
02:00:58.000And there's something intrinsically inflammatory about us doing this job, not only in the minds of jihadists, but in the minds of normal Muslims who would never think of waging jihad, but they just find it...
02:01:12.000It's intolerable to see Western guys sitting in office parks in Vegas flying drones over Pakistan, which are pretty precise, and they kill a lot of bad people, but they also kill some innocent bystanders.
02:01:32.000You 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...
02:01:38.000Or if you're a person with conscience.
02:01:40.000No, but there's a religious solidarity that is working against us, which the only remedy for which I think is to have moderate Muslims, wherever they can be found, to rise up and own this thing.
02:01:57.000Until moderate Muslims find Al-Qaeda and the Taliban every bit as inimical to their hopes for this world as we do.
02:02:15.000I want to go back to what you said about the war being so expensive in the first place that it wouldn't be a war for selling drugs for profit.
02:02:22.000I'm not saying that it's entirely involved or it's based on selling drugs for profit, but there's no denying that the heroin production has increased radical since NATO opened up.
02:03:49.000And the idea is that they're saying that the reason why they do it is because they need to help these people grow their crops so that they'll ride on the Taliban.
02:03:57.000Yeah, which is a perfectly reasonable explanation for me.
02:04:00.000So you just tell me that there are Marines guarding a poppy field.
02:04:05.000There are many interpretations of that, but one is just what you gave.
02:04:09.000They 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.
02:04:23.000Item number one in engineering that cooperation can't be, let's force all these people to destroy the most profitable crop they could grow.
02:04:36.000That's an interesting way of looking at it.
02:04:38.000The unfortunate thing for me, though, is that there's a ton of evidence that the United States government has been involved in drug smuggling.
02:04:44.000There was a CIA jet that had been to Guantanamo Bay twice that crashed with several tons of cocaine in Mexico.
02:05:04.000There's a guy named Barry Seal who was involved in, back during the Pablo Escobar days, he was, according to him, he was selling drugs for the CIA. There's also what happened with Freeway Ricci and the whole Oliver North, Contras, and Nicaragua situation.
02:05:17.000The United States was clearly involved in drug trafficking.
02:06:24.000Is there someone controlling the game and are their interests aligned enough so that they really have control over it?
02:06:31.000In most cases, I'm not saying that people never conspire or that It's not possible to have a sufficient number of people in power who have selfish and short-sighted interests that can get them to do terrible things on the world stage.
02:06:49.000That clearly could happen, at least in principle, but for the most part, There's just people's interests are not aligned all that well.
02:06:58.000Halliburton is not that powerful so that it could decide to launch a war.
02:07:03.000And one way you can see this, or one thing I would get you to reflect on, is you take someone like President Obama.
02:07:13.000When he was Senator Obama, he was against Yeah, but I'm asking how you account for that transformation in him.
02:07:30.000So he's someone who was a critic of the former administration.
02:07:36.000Before he was elected, if you had asked him What do you think about Bush and what do you think about Cheney and what do you think about Rumsfeld and all the stuff they did?
02:07:49.000He said many of these things, but he had a...
02:07:52.000A very clear critique based on liberal principles that almost any liberal who was enthusiastic about his election would recognize that the Iraq war was unnecessary.
02:08:12.000Now there's a mess that has to be cleaned up.
02:08:14.000But now he's become To the eyes of many liberals, just a neocon shill, someone who's more secretive and more agile in his prosecution of a covert war than Bush and Cheney ever were.
02:08:33.000So how do you explain that transformation?
02:08:36.000Is he someone who was always that way and was just lying, but lying for some reason that doesn't make much political sense?
02:08:50.000Some nefarious process, some star chamber where the people who are really in power got to him and scared him.
02:08:57.000He's president of the United States, but he had a meeting with Halliburton and a bunch of powerful guys, some billionaires who scared him straight, and now he's just doing their bidding.
02:09:19.000Obviously, the interpretation I favor.
02:09:21.000Or, 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.
02:09:53.000And 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?
02:10:05.000Imagine having the responsibility to protect whole cities from massive acts of terror.
02:10:11.000Just how squeamish are you going to be about bugging people's cell phones?
02:10:17.000I 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.
02:10:30.000As far left as many people want him to be, but there's no reason to doubt that he objected to the Iraq war and he's basically a straight down the middle of the fairway liberal who's now essentially functioning like a neocon.
02:10:44.000I think the details have to be terrifying and I think it's just an immense responsibility.
02:10:52.000I think it's very possible that both things are going on.
02:10:56.000It's very possible that there are people that are absolutely profiting and want to get involved in wars for profit.
02:11:02.000And I think also the world is scary and I think it's easy to convince a guy like Obama.
02:11:07.000I don't doubt that Halliburton sees an upside to a war because they make all the stuff and they provide the services.
02:11:15.000So yeah, the next war is part of their business plan.
02:11:20.000But the question is, how much power does any one person have?
02:11:24.000For every billionaire like the Koch brothers who's twirling his mustache and doing the nefarious right-wing thing, there are billionaires who do not align with them politically who can do the left-wing thing.
02:11:40.000Right, but that's a microcosm of human beings in general.
02:11:43.000There's evil people and there's nice people.
02:11:45.000That doesn't necessarily preclude the idea that someone, not just profits off war, but engineers war for profit.
02:11:51.000It seems if you're talking about something like billions and billions of dollars, and you can justify to yourself this inevitable anyway because these people are cave people, and they're going to fuck up, and you've got all these, look what they do to women, look what they do to their people, look what they do to each other, look what they do to fellow Muslims.
02:12:03.000You're also maybe not making the best humanitarian choices because you're making choices based on profit.
02:12:10.000And the profit is absolutely enormous.
02:12:14.000And there's pretty clear evidence the United States basically lied to get into the Iraq War.
02:12:18.000I mean, I know that there was a lot of people that genuinely believed that there was something going on in Iraq and genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein was a threat.
02:12:25.000But there's also people that believe it was a whole lot of fuckery, including Colin Powell.
02:12:29.000Well, when Colin Powell delivered that presentation at the UN, virtually everyone, with a few exceptions, virtually everyone believed that that was true.
02:12:45.000The premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was uncontroversial, and all the people who were against our going in there We're against it for reasons that did not entail doubting whether there were weapons of mass destruction.
02:13:02.000There were other reasons not to go in there.
02:13:04.000It's just it was going to – it was a hornet's nest.
02:13:06.000It was going to – it was a quagmire.
02:13:08.000It was – What specifically are the weapons of mass destruction that would motivate us going there and not going into North Korea?
02:13:43.000This is an adage, I don't know where it comes from, but never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
02:13:49.000Or the tragedy of wasted opportunity, the idea that just because a tragedy gets capitalized on doesn't mean that the people who capitalize on it cause the tragedy, but that's a standard operational procedure for warriors to find something wrong and say, look, this is what happened, we got attacked, we're going into Iraq.
02:14:56.000It's not half a million guys and tanks.
02:14:59.000Right, because it's 19 guys and not Halliburton, not a multi-billion dollar operation that the former CEO just happens to be the vice president of the United States and gets multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to go and rebuild shit we blow up.
02:15:40.000Someone conspired to fly planes into buildings and whether or not the United States government was involved or whether or not it was these 19 guys from Saudi Arabia.
02:16:18.000And once you get deep into the 9-11 conspiracy, You get the CIA faking voices of all the passengers on the flights explaining the answering machine messages.
02:16:54.000Every anomaly, any event you could possibly describe, is going to have a million what look like coincidences in it, and which, if you tried to engineer Beforehand,
02:17:10.000it would seem like the odds against them were astronomical.
02:17:13.000But in the aftermath, something had to happen.
02:17:15.000So it's like people sold stock in American Airlines that day, right?
02:17:20.000So how is it that you sold your stock in American Airlines the day before?
02:17:26.000An American Airlines jet flew into a building.
02:17:36.000There are an uncountable number of things like that, but if you're only looking for anomalies and you're not constrained by any overall thesis, You can find them in any situation.
02:17:51.000But just be honest about what this picture of reality actually is.
02:17:55.000This is the most diabolical plot in human history that entailed thousands of conspiracists or conspiracists.
02:18:25.000It's like this marriage of Perfectly competent diabolical intelligence with the most inept...
02:18:33.000So all these people conspired perfectly and yet the Iraq war was launched as ineptly as it could possibly have been.
02:18:42.000Well, I certainly don't believe that the United States was involved in conspiring.
02:18:46.000I think there's some question that maybe some people might have known about it.
02:18:50.000The real issue comes when you find out about actual real false flags.
02:18:54.000Actual real false flag events that the United States has engineered, that they've pulled off, that they haven't pulled off, that they were planning, that they didn't go through.
02:19:00.000The real problem is that that's a genuine ideology.
02:19:13.000So 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.
02:19:28.000You just shoot down one of our planes, and then you tell the world that Iraq, though we told them they couldn't shoot at us, shot down one of our planes.
02:21:15.000Isn't conspiracies, aren't they religious?
02:21:16.000Isn't a belief that the government engineered 9-11, or isn't a million different conspiracies, don't they have sort of a religious aspect to them?
02:21:23.000The pure belief, the confirmation bias, the ignoring anything contradictory.
02:21:27.000People want to have an answer for sure, definitely.
02:21:31.000There's that real thing that people want to wrap something up tight with a bow.
02:21:35.000Either the government is full of evil criminals that are trying to kill your baby, or it's all just a part of life and the real issue is there's boogeyman out there.
02:21:43.000Yeah, I think it hijacks some of the same features of the human mind or of certain human minds because many people are very uncomfortable without cognitive closure.
02:21:56.000Not knowing why something happened is destabilizing to people to different degrees.
02:22:04.000Whereas one person can just feel no emotional cost To living with the mystery of why something happened or freely admitting that they have no idea or merely having a hunch, other people crave certainty and there are other features to it.
02:22:22.000So people have an intuition that something huge couldn't have been kicked off by something trivial.
02:22:29.000So if something huge happened, if this thing, this 3,000 people dead and the biggest buildings coming down and the world in chaos, that couldn't have been just 19 guys with box cutters.
02:22:43.000That had to be—the cause had to be bigger.
02:22:45.000And that, I think, is an intuition that some people have more than others, and it's a faulty intuition, but some people— Have certain schemas through which they view human events which make conspiracy thinking very plausible.
02:23:05.000And you'll notice that, and there's been actually research done on this, that if you're someone who believes one conspiracy theory, you're very likely to be someone who believes all of them.
02:23:13.000You're someone who's read the JFK books and who's read the...
02:23:19.000The Roswell incident, you're talking about extraterrestrials and CIA misadventures in many places.
02:23:31.000There'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.
02:23:40.000It's kind of a personality type that...
02:24:05.000I started out liking him, not liking him in that I aligned with all of his views or even many of his views.
02:24:12.000We had a I did a brief personal exchange by email where he actually did me a favor, which was great and actually links up with this conspiracy thing.
02:24:23.000So I have someone in my life who's Who is very close to me, who is a 9-11 conspiracy.
02:24:49.000And one idea I had about how to debunk it is I noticed that he had a few liberal writers who he really admired, and Glenn Greenwald was the top of the list.
02:25:00.000And I knew that Glenn Greenwald couldn't be a 9-11 conspiracy guy.
02:25:06.000And I said, will you do me a favor and just tell me in a short little essay why you don't I don't believe any of this stuff.
02:25:15.000Why is it that you seem to align with a lot of these concerns, the overreach of power and NSA wiretapping, and why is someone in your position not at all attracted by this 9-11 truth nonsense?
02:25:30.000He wrote the perfect email, and I told him why I needed this.
02:25:34.000It was basically an intervention for a family member.
02:25:37.000He wrote the perfect email, which was just crazy enough to give him perfect credibility.
02:25:42.000He was grateful for the 9-11 truth people, and it was a perfect email.
02:25:47.000I imagined that I was going to send this into my relative's brain, and he was going to have the epiphany that I was expecting, which was Here's someone he trusts as an authority on all of these points, and this is why this guy,
02:26:02.000who's got much more time to look at this than my relative does, this is why he won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
02:26:11.000And it did not have that effect at all.
02:26:13.000All he wanted to do was to get in touch with Glenn Greenwald, to educate him, show him all the stuff that he hadn't seen, right?
02:26:18.000But 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.
02:26:34.000And when I called him on it privately, he just doubled down.
02:27:03.000This is why the NSA thing sort of hit me in the wrong part of my brain because when Glenn was the quarterback for the Snowden revelations, Basically,
02:27:19.000I saw a guy who was just blogging in his underpants in Brazil with his 10 dogs and his boyfriend who was handed this story, which is in fact true.
02:27:26.000I mean, he's not this great investigative journalist who found this.
02:27:29.000He was, based on his ideological bias and his track record, was someone who Snowden...
02:27:35.000Liked and thought would be a very sympathetic ear for this story.
02:27:41.000So tomorrow night, someone could email you the next big decades-shaking story based on your interests and how they align with his.
02:27:50.000And that wouldn't make you the greatest investigative journalist.
02:27:54.000So anyway, so Greenwald was someone who really was not functioning like a journalist.
02:27:58.000And he certainly does not have the principles of Of honesty and fact-checking and admitting when he got something wrong that most journalists have drummed into them.
02:28:08.000So I find him a very unreliable witness.
02:28:37.000Whereas if you were sitting in front of that person talking to them and you said that, they'd be like, well, I don't think that.
02:28:41.000No, you've misinterpreted my position.
02:28:42.000I think this and I respect your opinion.
02:28:44.000You could have a nice exchange and someone can just spew out their nonsense in a blog with no one checking them.
02:28:51.000It gets really squirrely when you're allowed to do that unchecked with no social cues.
02:28:56.000And that's what he did, but he considers it a virtue.
02:29:00.000He said this in the New York Times when he was just becoming famous for the Snowden story.
02:29:06.000They asked him about his approach to journalism.
02:29:08.000He said that he approaches it as a litigator.
02:29:11.000He assumes people are lying, and then he goes and tries to prove that they're lying.
02:29:19.000Interpersonally, this is a highly dysfunctional and obnoxious way to be.
02:29:24.000When I'm representing my ideas, he's assuming I'm lying, and he goes to try to prove that I'm lying.
02:29:32.000Then he quote mines, or he gets readers to quote mine my work, Where he can pull sentences out of context, which seems – out of context, I can see how someone would see it as an inflammatory thing to say about Islam.
02:29:45.000But I have not been – it's impossible to catch me saying something extreme about Islam that I didn't mean to say.
02:29:52.000Everything I've ever said about Islam is incredibly – Well thought out.
02:29:57.000I know exactly what I think, and it has absolutely no logical relationship to racism because everything I say applies every bit as much to John Walker Lind or Adam Gadon or any white guy who woke up in Marin or Orange County and decided to join the jihad.
02:30:16.000In fact, it applies even more to them because they weren't indoctrinated from birth by any kind of Middle Eastern cultural upbringing.
02:30:24.000And so I view Greenwald as just the least scrupulous and among the most consequential people who have been flogging this Islamophobia thing.
02:30:44.000And so insofar as the NSA story has been his story, I've had to do a lot of It's a parsing of what's said because his intuitions about what is important and factual I just fundamentally don't trust.
02:31:13.000So for you it's just a very bittersweet thing because you don't like that guy personally.
02:31:16.000But also I'm uncertain about where the line is between...
02:31:22.000Facts we genuinely want to know and a public service rendered by journalists and whistleblowers who leak those facts and treason that is really consequential that we should have laws against and prosecute people for.
02:31:37.000And I don't know where Snowden falls on that continuum.
02:31:40.000I'm just agnostic as to what Ten years from now, are we going to think he was a hero or someone who did our country more harm than anyone in the last hundred years?
02:31:52.000I don't know the answer to that question.
02:31:53.000I really think he's the guy who got the ball rolling.
02:32:32.000If given a menu of things to check off, you and I may check different boxes in what we want them to do.
02:32:42.000Frankly, 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.
02:32:57.000From being convinced that, oh yeah, we really do want that information.
02:33:01.000Yeah, yeah, I don't want my daughter to grow up in a world where nukes are going off in our cities.
02:33:06.000So yeah, if you're telling me that tapping that phone or reading all email, if only retrospectively, is a way to stop that, and here's why, here's why you think that, I could be sold on all of these points.
02:33:21.000I mean, there's nothing about my email That I feel like needs to be private if you keep raising the stakes on the side of arguing why it shouldn't be private.
02:33:34.000But isn't the argument always that the United States has shown a long history of deception?
02:34:04.000I talk about this briefly in my book, about espionage being something that if you grant that undercover operations are sometimes necessary...
02:34:14.000Then what you're saying is there is some space in which otherwise good and ethical people are going to need to lie.
02:34:20.000Now, the way I think about that is I think that is necessary.
02:34:25.000I think it is someone – it is a life that I don't want.
02:34:29.000I couldn't be – I couldn't work for the NSA. But it's an unfortunate fact in the world we live in.
02:34:40.000I view it as a kind of – Moral self-immolation, where you have to take a hit for the team in this spectacular way in order to function in that space, but I think it's probably necessary.
02:34:54.000But within that frame, it's not actually deceptive.
02:34:57.000If the NSA says, listen, we're going to suck up a ton of data, And we're going to abide by laws.
02:35:05.000We're not going to imprison you for growing pot based on having sucked this data up, but we're looking for jihadists.
02:35:59.000When you talked earlier about your friend, the story about the woman who lied in front of her friend and immediately damaged the relationship, why would you ever, knowing that the government has planned and possibly executed false flags, why would you ever give them the benefit of the doubt?
02:36:17.000Well, again, this comes to the larger question of human nature.
02:36:23.000What do you think is going on in the world?
02:36:24.000Do you think that most people most of the time are psychopaths or...
02:36:31.000Are they ruthlessly mercenary and out to just screw everyone?
02:36:36.000Or do you think those are the anomalies?
02:36:42.000Do you think government is so corrupting of otherwise good people that they're just going to run riot with their power all the time and everywhere?
02:36:52.000Or do you think basically it's a lot of good people We're inefficiently trying to get stuff done that we need done.
02:36:58.000And if you're on the more realistic side of those questions, I think you have to admit that for the most part There are people just like us in a vast bureaucracy trying to get stuff done,
02:37:17.000and 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.
02:37:28.000And so to conspire to just grab all the strings of The military and wage a war on false pretenses or divert our fighter jets so that this hijacked plane can fly into the World Trade Center.
02:37:47.000How 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?
02:37:55.000Then what you're attributing to people are conscious motives to kill Massive numbers of innocent people that I think just could not form in the minds of most people most of the time.
02:38:05.000Well, if that's the case, then how did false flags ever get planned out?
02:38:09.000How was the Northwoods document ever signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetoed by Kennedy?
02:38:14.000Where they were planning on arming Cuban friendlies and bombing Guantanamo Bay.
02:38:18.000Where they were going to have a drone jetliner.
02:38:20.000They were going to have a jet and blow it up.
02:38:22.000And they were going to blame it on the Cubans.
02:39:06.000No, but the consequence of even one is this very conversation, these very doubts in the minds of millions of people.
02:39:13.000But wouldn't you assume when there's been several that it's probably a method of operating, that that's how they do it?
02:39:19.000If you find out about the Gulf of Tonkin, you find out what Bush and Cheney were planning on Iran before they left office, or allegedly, what do I know?
02:39:26.000You know, when you find out about the Northwoods document, where do you put all that?
02:39:50.000If there wasn't any evidence, if it was just 9-11 and everybody was using that as an example, I agree with you.
02:39:56.000I think it's probably most likely a series of coincidences and most likely we just had lax security and most likely 19 people planned this out and pulled it off.
02:40:04.000However, when you look at the Gulf of Tonkin, when you look at the Northwoods incident, when you look at all these different things that we have planned, it's not one, it's several.
02:40:14.000And it's several over the course of several different administrations.
02:40:21.000I mean, during Kennedy's day, they were doing this.
02:40:24.000Well, what I would say is that in the case of 9-11, you have on the other side a very obvious conspiracy that's taking credit for it, that has taken credit for it.
02:40:37.000I mean, you have this phenomenon of al-Qaeda and global jihad.
02:40:41.000Much of this violence is directed at the rest of the Muslim world.
02:40:47.000But we have a clear enemy that thinks it's our enemy that is taking credit for these I mean, to call them an own goal when you have someone who's seemed to be the kicker and who's taking credit for being the kicker,
02:41:06.000and it just seems like it's a misapplication of the principle, even if we were going to agree that we...
02:41:16.000You know, every few years, draw our own blood for some perverse reason of trying to motivate ourselves to do something we wouldn't otherwise want to do.
02:41:25.000Well, I would assume that if there's a series of events that have taken place that have absolutely either been planned or absolutely...
02:41:31.000I mean, the Northwoods document is pretty straightforward.
02:41:44.000I mentioned Gulf of Tonkin in the book, and there are many other...
02:41:50.000More easily understood big lies that should worry us.
02:41:56.000For instance, I mentioned pharmaceutical companies.
02:41:58.000Pharmaceutical 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.
02:42:10.000When you have people, there's no one who knows more about Whether drugs are efficacious than the people who are designing drugs.
02:42:19.000Right, but isn't that kind of disingenuous?
02:42:20.000You're dealing with an entirely different group of people that you're saying are also evil.
02:42:23.000It has nothing to do with the government.
02:42:32.000That is the thing that enables all of this.
02:42:36.000I 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.
02:42:52.000There are endless numbers of examples of this.
02:42:54.000You don't have to be a bad person to behave in evil ways.
02:42:58.000If you're part of a system, the entire tendency of which is to incline toward evil.
02:43:06.000If you just follow the incentives, and so they're very simple petri dish examples of this.
02:43:13.000One example I use is We talk about what it's like to be thrown into a maximum security prison.
02:43:19.000Imagine you get sent to Folsom Prison and you're an innocent person, you're not a violent person, and you have this nightmare experience of now you're thrown in prison for a crime you didn't commit.
02:43:35.000All you want to do is get through this experience, your tenure, say.
02:43:41.000All you want to do is do your decade of time in peace, unmolested by all these other people.
02:43:49.000And you're terrified that you're going to be victimized by people.
02:43:52.000The reality is that you're coming into a situation where the incentives are so perversely misaligned that even a good person like you who just wants to be a nice guy is going to have to align himself With racist psychopaths in order to not be screwed over by everyone.
02:44:14.000So for instance, in most maximum security prisons, they exist in a perpetual state of race war.
02:44:21.000So it's the whites against the blacks, against the Mexicans, and certain Mexicans against other Mexicans, but it's just like you have It's shattered into racial gangs, and a white guy like you would have to join a white supremacist gang.
02:44:38.000Now, 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.
02:44:47.000But isn't what you're saying another reason to not trust the government?
02:44:50.000You're saying that the government's evil.
02:44:51.000You're saying that good people do evil things because they get involved with evil psychopaths, meaning the government, which is why false flags occur.
02:44:58.000No, I'm saying that we need to be aware of...
02:45:01.000The 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,
02:45:23.000There are many ways in which Conflicts of interest are the classic example.
02:45:28.000You have CEOs who can run the global economy off a cliff because their incentives are totally perverse.
02:45:36.000There's no economic incentive for them not to just leverage their company out of existence if they can benefit from this windfall pop of the stock and they have a golden parachute.
02:45:57.000You're going to get people being rapaciously selfish to the detriment of everyone.
02:46:01.000And so the point I'm making is that there are two levels at which you can try to improve human life.
02:46:08.000You can argue that each person needs to have a more refined ethical code.
02:48:18.000What about the – did you pay any attention to the plan allegedly that Bush and Cheney were concocting to get us into Iran before he left office?
02:48:28.000So for instance, there's a new book about the Kennedy assassination, which brings – and I don't know if – I don't think the guy is a conspiracy theorist at all here, but I think he thinks Oswald did it.
02:48:37.000But there's a new book which shows – What do you think?
02:49:39.000You can look at some nefarious interpretation of that.
02:49:43.000He 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.
02:49:54.000Or he's just a guy who's embarrassed to ask the grieving widow who was a friend of his about what it was like to see her husband's face get blown off.
02:50:06.000There are alternate explanations for these things, and yet the conspiracy side is always the nefarious, mustache-twirling, perfect genius of evil interpretation.
02:50:18.000I think that rarely is true, certainly in a society where I think there's probably a little bit of both in there.
02:50:31.000I think there's definitely some inept qualities of the Warren Commission, but there's also this search for a predetermined outcome.
02:50:38.000That's why the whole reason why the magic bullet theory was invented was because there was a bullet that hit a curbstone.
02:51:41.000But 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,
02:51:57.000It's going to create a huge mess for everybody else.
02:52:00.000When you look at what people do because they're afraid to get sued, just look at all of the stupid decisions people make in our society because they just want to hide the problem.
02:52:15.000On what it's like to become a neurosurgeon called When the Air Hits Your Brain.
02:52:19.000And it's a pretty entertaining and somewhat harrowing look at just the training of a neurosurgeon.
02:52:25.000So he talks about what it was like to be a resident neurosurgeon.
02:52:28.000And at one point there's a scene where a resident is a...
02:52:33.000He's prepping his first surgery, which entails drilling into a person's skull and cutting a large hole and prepping the person's head for the chief neurosurgeon to come in and perform surgery.
02:52:53.000And what he did is he drove the drill in way too deep.
02:52:57.000It's just supposed to do skull, but he just went into pure pink oatmeal.
02:53:25.000If you had a system in which he would be massively rewarded in some way for exposing that problem, I mean, it's hard to see how you would design that, but that would be a much better system.
02:53:37.000If the incentives were aligned in a way that his guilty conscience would win as opposed to his effort to preserve his career.