Making Sense - Sam Harris - #410 — The Whole Catastrophe

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

00:00:11.780 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing

00:00:15.740 the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

00:00:20.100 Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program,

00:00:25.900 where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,

00:00:30.740 and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

00:00:34.080 So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

00:00:45.340 I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, it's great to see you again.

00:00:48.880 Very good to see you, Sam.

00:00:50.380 So this has been interesting. I feel like I'm riding shotgun on at least

00:00:55.860 one car crash of late, where we're going to talk about your experience on the Joe Rogan

00:01:00.840 experience. And it was an experience, but we're going to talk about your book as a-

00:01:05.120 I'm not sure I like the opening about a car crash, but yeah.

00:01:11.160 Maybe Grand Theft Auto.

00:01:12.760 It'll be justified. 0.87

00:01:13.660 You get out of a crash and just get into another car.

00:01:15.720 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that is our method. But you have a book on democracies and death

00:01:22.040 cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization, which is, I guess, is part of now a quartet of

00:01:28.260 books. The Strange Death of Europe, The Death of the West, or-

00:01:32.500 The War of the West.

00:01:33.260 The War of the West.

00:01:33.680 The Manus of Crowds.

00:01:34.480 And Manus of Crowds.

00:01:35.400 Yeah.

00:01:36.020 I mean, all of which hit the same grotesque object of Western capitulation to unreason and

00:01:44.540 a kind of masochistic flight from sanity in the face of the provocation of Islamism and 1.00

00:01:51.900 jihadism and other attendant confusions. I think we will cover all that. I'm definitely

00:01:58.160 going to track through the book with you, but I want to start with the intervention you

00:02:03.040 attempted to perform on our mutual friend, Joe. I hope he's still a mutual friend. That

00:02:08.960 remains to be seen, I guess. And his sidekick, Dave Smith, over on the podcast. Because I

00:02:16.100 thought what you attempted there was fantastic and much needed. This was a kind of moral intervention,

00:02:23.880 which I thought was very important to do. I've been attempting my version of it, not directly

00:02:29.080 in dialogue with Joe, but I certainly would do that as well. I thought what you said was

00:02:36.720 quite brilliant and important. And I think there are probably a few crucial points that

00:02:42.540 were misunderstood. And so I'd like to do a bit of a postmortem on that. But I'm wondering

00:02:48.380 what your experience of it was. How do you view, how much of the aftermath have you seen? No doubt,

00:02:54.740 even if you don't read comments, you're still getting some of the comments somehow because

00:02:58.500 it's a tsunami.

00:02:59.620 I don't really follow very closely. If I think I've done the right thing, which I try to do

00:03:08.960 routinely, I don't think I ever knowingly mean to do the wrong thing. But if I do something,

00:03:14.200 I feel perfectly content with myself in that I can look myself in the mirror the next morning.

00:03:19.700 I have no interest in seeing what people rampaging across the internet have to say.

00:03:24.380 Right. So although there is a certain type of almost friend who can never resist sending you

00:03:30.940 the nastiest response they've seen online is saying, I disagree with this person.

00:03:36.620 That's right. I don't think you're nearly that fat or ugly. 0.99

00:03:41.220 I disagree with everyone else. I like you. Despite some people doing that and thus giving me a glimpse 0.96

00:03:46.260 into it, I really don't bother. I have a book out. I've been doing a lot of traveling and speaking

00:03:51.420 and so on. So I don't really have time to absorb very much of the podcast, talking about podcast

00:03:57.900 meltdown that I gather has occurred.

00:04:00.240 I saw your collision on Newsnight after that.

00:04:04.020 Oh, that was just a typical BBC thing. They got me into pre-record for 20 minutes. I attacked

00:04:10.220 Newsnight. They edited it down to seven minutes and then afterwards had a panel of three people

00:04:14.820 to attack me in your absence.

00:04:17.860 I'm sort of, I'm sort of used to that. I find it sort of normal that if I'm allowed to speak on

00:04:23.300 the BBC, they must have, you know, 500 anti-Douglasites to, uh, to defame me and much more. And that's

00:04:31.840 fine. I don't care.

00:04:33.440 That actually surprised me. I thought the level of confusion they expressed, uh, there in the

00:04:40.540 aftermath is now on Newsnight. I thought that the pendulum had swung back enough in the UK where

00:04:45.940 that species of confusion wouldn't be so prominent.

00:04:48.780 Not on the national broadcast. So the national broadcast, as I think I told them in one of the

00:04:52.360 bits, so they edited it out. I said, you're just wildly out of date. Like this is weird. This is

00:04:56.620 having a conversation from 10 years ago and you just haven't updated your software and, uh,

00:05:01.260 shame, shame, but that's why nobody watches the program.

00:05:04.340 Um, so I want to know your, what was your experience of attempting that intervention? How

00:05:10.400 did you, how did it strike you in the moment?

00:05:12.980 Well, I liked Joe and enormously admired what he's done. He's, uh, he's so good at talking about

00:05:19.760 interesting things with guests easily. And for a long time that a lot of other people think that

00:05:24.600 it's extremely easy and it just isn't easy. He's a, he's a master of it. But I had noticed that he

00:05:31.940 had in recent years, not really had anyone on who had my views about the Russia Ukraine conflict or

00:05:38.180 indeed about the Israel Hamas conflict. And, uh, and he had had some people on who I have had to

00:05:44.800 become aware of very annoyingly, like all of us, but who are just retreads of a school of pseudo

00:05:52.180 history, which was seen off a long time ago and which I dislike. And I suppose I just wanted to try to

00:06:00.020 say to Joe as gentle as possible that I thought that something was going very badly wrong here

00:06:05.720 and that he was misleading his viewers about listeners, about what the, the story is on each

00:06:11.540 of these things, you know, that specifically that, you know, Ukraine actually does have a right to

00:06:15.780 defend itself against Putin's aggression. Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas's brutal 0.84

00:06:21.700 invasion of Israel. And I believe, and just, just wait for this. I think Adolf Hitler was a really 0.85

00:06:29.840 bad guy. I do. Yeah. Uh, as Norma Donald said, I've said it before I'll say it again. I said it

00:06:36.640 before it was cool to say it. Um, I think Adolf Hitler was the bad guy of world war two. And I think 0.75

00:06:41.980 Churchill was one of the people in history who saved civilization, almost single-handed at one point

00:06:47.880 in 1940. And so when I see people just throwing out the, this absolute rubbish about, for instance,

00:06:59.200 what they try to do is they try to minimize the crimes of Hitler. They try to maximize the crimes 0.95

00:07:03.920 of Churchill. This is what David Irving used to try before he was completely debunked as well.

00:07:09.000 And then what you do is you have this thing where you say that the allies and the Nazis were on an

00:07:13.980 equal footing in world war two. And then you go for your next move, which is actually the allies

00:07:18.500 were the baddies. Right. I just, I can't put up with that. I just, it's, it's intolerable to sit

00:07:23.940 by and see this stuff going on. And so, yes, I tried to cite that. I was, of course, the whole thing

00:07:30.080 was two against one because although Joe has had people like comic Dave Smith, by the way, I have yet

00:07:36.780 to hear being funny on anything. And maybe, you know, somebody else can point me to it, but he's

00:07:43.360 just spent 18 months criticizing Israel in the most ignorant terms. And, um, I was annoyed that 0.92

00:07:50.720 Joe had said, you know, you can only come on if you're on with comic Dave Smith. Whereas just a week

00:07:56.520 before comic Dave Smith was on, on his own, once again, sounding off and he didn't seem to need a

00:08:00.880 bodyguard or tag team double or anything like that. So, so, okay. It's two against one. That's,

00:08:07.680 I've had worse odds, but it makes it extremely difficult, undoubtedly, because if I'd had a

00:08:13.060 sidekick, they could have mopped up some of my points, but you know. Yeah. I mean, I think the,

00:08:18.600 there are several reasons why it was almost an impossible task. I mean, there's something,

00:08:24.620 you know, in there. Well, the only, I should just say the only tasks worth doing are the impossible.

00:08:28.620 That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to try to track through what I think is a, is a kind of the

00:08:35.460 center of their confusion. Cause I think there's, there's something that's genuinely hard to parse

00:08:39.300 here around the role of expertise and you know, what, what it is, how we recognize it, when we honor

00:08:45.900 it, uh, how you avoid arguing from authority, et cetera. I think that some of that stuff is genuinely

00:08:51.320 confusing and they were mightily confused by it and quite content to be and, and felt that you were

00:08:56.660 simply arguing from authority and, and urging upon them some kind of mirror credentialism.

00:09:02.340 It was clear to me, you weren't doing that, but, and this relates obviously both to, to both the

00:09:06.840 topics you were touching, the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. I will focus on Gaza because I want 0.97

00:09:12.000 to track through your argument in your book. But, um, one thing I would just point out is that the war

00:09:18.020 in Ukraine and the, and the war in Gaza are connected in at least two senses. For one, it's, um,

00:09:24.340 it's clear which side of those conflicts you should be on if you want to be defending the West and

00:09:29.900 open societies and liberal democracies against their enemies. Uh, and secondly, Vladimir Putin is

00:09:35.680 on the wrong side of both of these conflicts and Joe and Dave couldn't seem to untangle that. And,

00:09:43.160 um, yeah, I just think that's, uh, it's worth noting. So by the way, there's a, there's an additional

00:09:47.760 problem there, which is that I'm supportive of both countries' rights to self-defense. And, um,

00:09:54.120 unfortunately, because of the, uh, degradation of the age and the decision to make politics almost

00:10:00.180 entirely a team sport, whereas a part of, uh, on the American right, there's almost, certainly on the

00:10:07.280 mainstream Congress, Senate, and so on, there's mainstream support for the Israelis in their war

00:10:12.380 against Hamas. There's increasingly contempt for the right of the Ukrainians to defend themselves

00:10:17.600 against Putin. And the opposite exists on the left. So the left increasingly believes that Israel

00:10:22.980 does not have the right to defend itself, but the Ukraine does. So, um, I suppose I find myself, 0.97

00:10:28.800 in the words of Richard Strauss, as a librettist in Capricho, I find myself burning between two fires.

00:10:35.020 Yeah. Well, I'm going to try to push you into the, the right word fire a little bit, because,

00:10:39.720 uh, I think you have a problem there. Honestly, I think you have some unfortunate company that,

00:10:45.260 you know, it's just a matter of time before, uh, it becomes too uncomfortable to not notice the,

00:10:51.060 the differences of opinion. And Ukraine is obviously a very sore point, but I think it also

00:10:56.440 is worth worrying about the level of antisemitism on the right. And, and much of the confusion you saw

00:11:03.260 from, had you read the comments, you would have seen a tsunami of confusion coming from Joe's

00:11:08.420 audience. And much of that audience is not the, I would say most, I would maybe 90% of it isn't,

00:11:15.100 is kind of rightward leaning, if not fully in Trumpistan, it's definitely not the, the AOC

00:11:21.180 supporting, you know, leftward confusion. Yeah. But let's talk about expertise. So I have some notes

00:11:26.860 here because I find this, it's, this is all very clear in my mind, but I find that whenever I talk

00:11:31.520 about this, I fail to track it through systematically enough for people to have their doubts removed. So

00:11:38.200 the first point I think we need to make is that everyone acknowledges whether they want to or not,

00:11:44.920 everyone acknowledges the, the reality of expertise and its importance. And this is a point I think

00:11:51.640 you've made before. I've made it as well in response to the aftermath of your podcast with Joe

00:11:56.540 that, you know, if you put someone in front of Joe who wants to talk about MMA as though they were an

00:12:02.380 expert as though they knew something and they knew next to nothing, very, very quickly, Joe would

00:12:08.040 recognize the problem there and begin to turn down the screws and it would be excruciating, right?

00:12:12.900 There's just, there's no way you can pretend to know about MMA sitting in front of Joe Rogan when

00:12:17.460 you, when in fact you don't. Everyone, when they got on an airplane wants their pilot to be a real

00:12:21.920 pilot, not just, you know, one who's LARPing as a pilot or who's self-taught, you know, in a simulator

00:12:27.500 they have at home, uh, unless, unless they don't want to land the plane, right? In which case,

00:12:33.440 unless they're jihadists, but let's leave that aside. Yeah. If you were going for brain surgery

00:12:37.440 and just before you're wheeled into the, um, operating theater, comic Dave Smith appears and

00:12:43.060 says, I'm doing the task. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not an expert, but I never claimed to be an expert,

00:12:47.800 but I am carrying out the operation. Yes. Yeah. I've got a free four hours. It'll be inside your head.

00:12:53.660 Um, okay. So it's just simply indisputable that there's a, in any domain that matters and certainly

00:13:01.120 in any domain that purports to be in touch with reality, any side of it, whether it's journalism,

00:13:07.560 history, science, or just how to get things done, you know, just physically, whether you're a plumber

00:13:12.020 or not a plumber, right? The difference between knowing something or knowing nearly everything

00:13:18.280 and knowing nothing is extraordinary and it matters. And so far as the topic matters and

00:13:23.900 there is, so in that context, you can see that a consensus among experts is rather often meaningful,

00:13:29.460 right? So if you have the lone person who's going against the consensus of 99% of the specialists in

00:13:35.460 a field believe X and you've got somebody believing Y, maybe somebody who is himself an expert, he has the

00:13:41.920 right credentials, but certainly in the case of someone who, who isn't an expert and doesn't have the

00:13:46.380 right credentials, it is more often than not the case that you're, you're not in the presence of

00:13:50.700 a lone genius who's just figured everything out on his own. You're very likely in the presence of

00:13:55.380 somebody who's mistaken or a crank or otherwise, you know, has some incentive that, uh, is going

00:14:02.220 undetected and they're going against the, the mainstream for bad reasons. Now that's not to say

00:14:08.080 there's no such thing as there, there being a lone genius who does overturn a field of knowledge.

00:14:11.680 Yeah. But if you had, if you had to walk into a casino and bet on prevailing opinion in any field,

00:14:19.740 you would be right to bet on what 99% of oncologists think about this cancer rather than your, your uncle

00:14:26.760 who just has strong opinions about cancer. And that's just a probabilistic bet we all place every

00:14:33.160 day whenever we're granting credence to knowledge claims. And we're always tending to go with the

00:14:38.340 mainstream consensus of specialists. And that's because expertise really is a thing and probability

00:14:44.200 really is a thing. Right.

00:14:45.680 Well, I agree with, um, however, as you probably know, a significant caveat, which is that, as I've

00:14:52.420 said for a long time, one of the things that COVID did was it stripped us of the consensus that the

00:14:59.400 scientists were the last sort of cathedral of knowledge that you really did listen to.

00:15:06.260 Yeah.

00:15:06.940 And I, I, I, I said long time ago about this, that, you know, once, once trust the science

00:15:13.180 wasn't respected anymore for some good reasons, we were completely stripped of anything in our

00:15:20.380 society that we could trust. Yeah.

00:15:22.300 If you said trust the media, although there's great things in the media, but if you said trust

00:15:27.000 the media, increasingly people would laugh because the media would, much of the media

00:15:30.400 would let itself down in the realm of facts and, uh, unacknowledged biases. Yeah.

00:15:36.600 If you said trust the politicians, you know, um, I think generally that all, every time there's

00:15:46.040 a poll of public opinions about who they, who they trust more, I think journalists are somewhere 0.81

00:15:51.280 beneath, uh, hookers and, uh, politicians beneath us. So, I mean, it's, um, but science, this, the

00:15:59.180 breakdown of the science trust was devastating. And I think that the, the breakdown of belief in

00:16:06.820 almost everything in the state, everything, every arm of government, every, and the attributing of,

00:16:14.000 you know, the most appalling actions to parts of the security state, for instance, having somebody

00:16:20.240 like RFK Jr. saying that he, it was, uh, that the evidence that the CIA killed his uncle was

00:16:24.840 overwhelming. Right. Right. Well, that means that the CIA can kill presidents, which means that

00:16:30.080 you're in a country with a completely rogue intelligence service and, and just all of this

00:16:35.860 added onto it. But, but the COVID thing was the last cathedral to fall. It made science fall,

00:16:41.200 it seems to me. And, but, but I would argue, and I, and, uh, this was tacit in some of the things

00:16:46.600 you were saying, whether it was just the fact that you were there saying it, I would argue Joe

00:16:50.420 has more than his fair share of responsibility for that and alternative media in general, big podcasts

00:16:57.100 in general, but Joe above all, given his taste for conspiracy thinking and given the lessons he has

00:17:03.360 drawn from COVID. I mean, I, I'm not, so I, I share your concern about the failure of institutions

00:17:08.420 and the, the, obviously the woke ideological capture of so many mainstream institutions,

00:17:13.320 distorted scientific communication is to certainly distorted journalism. And it has predictably,

00:17:18.020 and to a degree that's intolerable, destroyed trust in those institutions. Yeah. But the,

00:17:22.760 the remedy for all of that is not mere contrarian anti-establishment, no nothingism or a, much less a

00:17:30.960 disavowal of expertise. It's real expertise, real science, real journalism being aimed at the correct

00:17:37.780 targets. Yes. Shorn of the dumb ideology that distorted that conversation in the first place.

00:17:42.080 Yes. And by the way, there's, um, I mean, there's a sort of delineation that's important to make as 0.95

00:17:46.980 well, which is, I think that part of the confusion that I'm told has been occurring is of course,

00:17:51.580 that I think that there are probably realms in our society stem, so on, which is just easier to

00:17:59.560 shore up. If you just make sure that stem subjects are as protected as possible from wild

00:18:06.180 ideological outside influence. Yeah. Sort of feels easier. Although even you had some,

00:18:10.960 I think it was the Smithsonian Institute was declared that the math was, was, was white

00:18:16.040 supremacist, you know, the notion of objectivity. Absolutely. I, I charted this in math. Having a

00:18:20.300 right answer. Absolutely. Don't think that it'll stop at stem, but stem it seems to me is more,

00:18:25.520 it could be more disciplined in order to just push that out. It's easier to see how that happened.

00:18:31.100 How do you do that in the humanities, including in the study of history? It's somewhat harder. Yeah.

00:18:36.020 And I think that is the case. Yeah, that's true. And I think that is somewhere where,

00:18:40.060 let alone with journalism and current events, I think that there is probably a harder way for

00:18:45.600 people to pass what expertise would look like. But as I said in my column in the New York Post today,

00:18:51.100 although journalism has been significantly deracinated of late, we do still have rules.

00:18:58.300 I mean, one rule for instance, is that if you are writing from a country, you are in the country, 0.78

00:19:04.140 you're not allowed. You don't have a VPN that's sending you through.

00:19:07.700 You're not allowed to sit in West Palm Beach, pretending to be on the front lines of the

00:19:13.420 Ukraine conflict. And a friend of mine who I do listen to said to me after that podcast,

00:19:20.060 maybe you were too annoyed with the lack of any credentials of comic Dave Smith and were just

00:19:29.500 angry that, you know, you needed and you needed to show that you were right and he was wrong. And I

00:19:34.020 thought, well, and I said, well, of course that. But I said that the real thing is just that simply

00:19:38.560 on a journalistic level, if you haven't spent your time on the ground somewhere, your ability to write

00:19:46.940 about it or the likelihood that your readers will read about it is very significantly diminished.

00:19:52.820 And I can't say that I don't resent rather spending so much of my life on the ground in places going

00:20:00.780 through things that my readers know I go through, but I don't go on about only to be told that my

00:20:06.660 witness, my testimony, my evidence is to be compared with somebody who has never gone further than

00:20:14.220 Wikipedia in their sourcing or I did the research about the region. It seems rather galling to me.

00:20:24.180 Well, this was a genuinely confusing point because so then now I'm bending over backwards to be

00:20:30.780 charitable to Dave Smith, who I notice rarely makes the effort in my direction or yours. When you were

00:20:38.040 saying to him, I mean, you were basically shaming him for pretending to know what was going on in Gaza

00:20:43.380 without ever having been there. And it was quite natural for you to do that because the point

00:20:47.480 you were making really would have been resolved had he been there because what became clear in the

00:20:52.540 conversation was he was reading into certain phrases like blockade or, you know, concentration

00:20:58.700 camp or open air prison, a notion that life was such, you know, pre-war in Gaza as to be completely

00:21:06.840 intolerable where, and you said, were you ever there? Did you ever see what life in Gaza was like

00:21:11.900 a few years ago? And no, he's never been to the region. And so it was, it was relevant to make

00:21:16.500 that point. But on his side, he wanted to argue and, and, you know, generically, I agree with this

00:21:22.200 that you need not, in order to judge the ethics of a war, right, provided you are actually in touch

00:21:28.880 with the facts about it and you're reading good sources and you're, you know what is actually

00:21:33.960 happening, you can judge the ethics and you can know who's on the moral high ground without ever

00:21:39.340 having been to either of the respective countries, right? Like you, you can, I mean, you could

00:21:43.240 obviously judge, we could be talking about a war that happened a hundred years ago and be scholars

00:21:48.320 of that conflict. And the burden is not upon either of us to have been to the region.

00:21:53.780 Well, that was a rather lame point that comic Dave Smith tried to make, which is he said, uh,

00:22:00.940 I haven't been to Nazi Germany either, but can I not have views about that? As I pointed out to him. 0.56

00:22:06.140 He does have views about that though. Yeah, he does have views about that. But I said, I said,

00:22:10.960 yeah, but I mean, you can't time travel, but you can travel. And this is to me quite an important

00:22:16.940 point, which is if the reason why it matters in the, in the now is that if you were litigating

00:22:22.900 a foreign conflict or domestic conflict that happened a hundred years ago, much, if not all

00:22:28.160 of the dust would have settled, you'd be able to get a rounded view of what was happening,

00:22:35.040 what had gone on and be able to reflect on it. When it's something that is happening now,

00:22:40.000 the dust is not settled by any means, literal or metaphorical. And the consensus view has not emerged

00:22:48.640 and much, if not most of the reporting and more that comes out of the region is, is wildly, uh, off.

00:22:58.500 Hmm. So I don't think it is possible actually to simply rely on some published sources. No,

00:23:07.260 no, I don't think that at all. And I think it would, it is the duty of somebody commenting on

00:23:12.520 such a thing to go and see it firsthand. And that is a journalistic standard. But there we get into

00:23:17.760 the follow on problem, which is the shape shifter thing. And I'm not talking about the, uh, language in

00:23:25.580 which the far right talks about the Jews, the shape shifter thing, which I was also trying to

00:23:29.980 fight in that conversation is the, I never said I was a historian.

00:23:34.980 Yeah. I just spent five hours on television this week declaiming about the topic.

00:23:38.520 I merely, when people introduce me as a historian, I don't demur from the, uh, the introduction.

00:23:43.380 And if somebody introduces me as the world's greatest living historian, I don't say,

00:23:46.820 excuse me.

00:23:48.280 Now you're talking about Daryl Cooper.

00:23:49.220 Yeah. But if you were to have at the beginning of this podcast introduced me as the world's

00:23:56.920 leading engineer of a suspension bridges, Douglas Murray, I think I might have, but if, if I started

00:24:06.120 to speak as if I was that at some point you are pretending to be that if, if you keep being

00:24:11.360 introduced to historian, but then you have the move of saying, I never said I was a historian.

00:24:14.820 Hmm. If you keep saying, uh, I'm a comedian, but I'm not, I'm a commentator on a particularly,

00:24:21.620 uh, febrile foreign conflict. And then you say, but you don't know about this and go,

00:24:26.280 well, I'm just a comedian. And you'd play these endless games of assertion of knowledge followed

00:24:33.380 by, if you get caught a, okay, I don't know about this. This is a very, very annoying rhetorical

00:24:39.840 trick that some of us have observed because it means you can never be pinned down because

00:24:45.780 you're always shifting your presentation of who you are. It was one of the things that

00:24:50.880 always made me most irritated about Russell brand who I've never wanted to debate with

00:24:57.940 or discuss with because I always saw him doing this, that he would, he would indeed 20 years

00:25:05.240 ago to go on the BBC announced the need for revolution, um, explain how we need to completely

00:25:10.940 change the system of global finance. He would get shown a chart and he would say, I ain't got

00:25:17.600 time for no chart. I'm not a comedian. Right. Yeah. This is a very annoying move. John Stewart

00:25:22.580 used to do it as well. Well, it's tennis without the net and you find you can hit the ball rather

00:25:28.780 hard when there's no net. Right. Yeah. And sometimes your rackets are made of jelly. I

00:25:34.080 mean, it's sort of just endlessly absurd. What are they doing in this thing? Why the constant

00:25:42.340 shifting? It's for people to work out what's going on there. The problem is that you're in

00:25:47.220 front of an audience and, you know, Joe is, has cultivated this audience and perhaps been

00:25:52.080 in turn changed by this audience that is anchored to some very strong, if unacknowledged claims about

00:26:00.660 the nature of knowledge and authority and also certain moral principles. I mean, so for instance,

00:26:06.900 I saw two, at least two heuristics running in the background of that conversation. One is

00:26:12.620 sunlight is the best disinfectant. And by sunlight, I mean, let's just turn on the microphones and talk

00:26:19.600 at length, right? That's so, there could be nothing intrinsically, there can be nothing wrong and

00:26:24.240 only goodness in sitting across the table from someone like Daryl Cooper, who is an amateur,

00:26:31.580 you know, self-taught historian, talented podcaster who has, as you pointed out, an appetite for,

00:26:37.660 you know, contrarian taboo history of the David Irving flavor about the Holocaust. Nothing wrong with 0.88

00:26:44.220 Joe just sitting with him for four hours and midwifing a conversation from him, which at no

00:26:52.500 point entails Joe pulling him up short on any of the points he's making. He's simply receiving this

00:26:58.920 person's expertise, even while if you pushed and said, oh, but are you really a historian? He'd say,

00:27:05.580 no, no, I'm just a podcaster. I'm a fan of history. But the assumption is, and again,

00:27:10.040 this is the assumption from Joe's audience, is that if you're talking for hours, people are going

00:27:14.780 to recognize what is true. You're trusting your audience to know what is true. And it is just an

00:27:20.340 obvious fact that you cannot trust Joe or his audience to know when an already debunked David

00:27:27.280 Irving talking point is being recycled in front of him, unless he's done the homework to know what

00:27:33.420 he's actually in dialogue with. Well, if I can say so, there are also two other things going on there.

00:27:37.800 One is, I suspect that what you describe as sort of viewer aggravation with appeals to expertise or

00:27:45.300 indeed defense of expertise feels like a personal assault on a large number of listeners because

00:27:51.400 they feel like they're doing that and they'd like to do that. It's elitism. 0.63

00:27:56.040 Yeah. But because they'd like to do that, they're kind of doing that by listening to long form

00:28:01.100 podcasting and developing views. Again, they are welcome to do that. I'm all for that. But the point

00:28:08.800 that I keep trying to bring across is that you can still hold on to the principle of truth,

00:28:16.820 of standards, and much more. And the second thing is, I think there is a very obvious

00:28:23.460 algorithmic excuse for this, which is that if you do a podcast in which you say Adolf Hitler was bad,

00:28:34.420 definitely the bad guy of World War II, and Churchill was a hero, the algorithm doesn't favor you.

00:28:39.700 Whereas if you say, aha, I've got this fantastic new view on it, which is that Hitler was trying not 0.94

00:28:44.900 to be at all anti-Semitic in the 1930s. He was keeping the whole stuff down. And then he just sort

00:28:48.880 of, you know, but they had his reasons to dislike the Jews. And I'm going to get into those in the

00:28:52.400 next podcast. And, and that's sort of your, your, you, you, you, you forgot the part that

00:28:59.200 there was no, no intention to kill the Jews. They just found that they couldn't feed them once they 0.83

00:29:02.780 rounded them all up. So it was more compassionate to put them to death. Might it not be more 0.79

00:29:07.840 compassionate to, to euthanize them. And that, unfortunately, that's what certain people are

00:29:14.180 doing and pushing. And I was genuinely, I mean, I said at the end, I said to Dave, I think he says

00:29:22.820 he has a, he has a Jewish grandfather. So he, I think he probably wouldn't be regarded as Jewish

00:29:27.640 in a very orthodox way, but he'd certainly be caught by the Nuremberg laws. And Hamas would 0.99

00:29:34.180 certainly regard him as full blown, fully Jewish, the complete catastrophe as Tom Stoppard memorably, 1.00

00:29:42.380 incredibly describes it.

00:29:44.180 But he, people like him who are doing this, I just warned him. I said, you must know,

00:29:51.460 because he said something like, you know, there's this sort of fertile ground at one point. I said,

00:29:55.640 you're doing the watering of it. You're watering this. You're, you're bringing it up. You're

00:30:02.880 conspicuously engaged in the process of trying to grow an extremely poisonous tree. And it's going

00:30:10.940 to get you and then all of us, by which I mean, of course, you encourage the most ugly, debunked,

00:30:20.760 destructive, bigotries of human history. And they are always ones which once they flourish and once

00:30:28.480 they grow, burn everyone.

00:30:29.860 The crucial point is that you were not saying that Dave Smith couldn't possibly be right because he's a

00:30:38.220 non-expert.

00:30:38.920 No.

00:30:39.500 You're saying that he's a non-expert and it shows because he's making obvious errors. And so it is

00:30:46.660 with Daryl Cooper. And so it is with any of these people that are getting platformed, right? And so it's

00:30:50.360 just, it's not the consequence of being a non-expert in this case is that these guys are

00:30:57.960 trafficking in recognizable distortions of fact and coming to the wrong moral conclusions as a

00:31:04.640 result. And then a very easy way to summarize that problem is, listen, you're talking to people

00:31:10.360 who are non-experts. Why not talk to the experts? That's not to deny the fact that people are entitled

00:31:16.580 to their own opinions, that sometimes someone can be self-taught and actually make a valid

00:31:20.820 contribution to knowledge.

00:31:21.760 Yes, absolutely.

00:31:22.400 And to flip it around, it's also the case that arguments from authority are illegitimate and

00:31:28.600 nothing is true simply because a consensus of Nobel laureates says it is. It's just that a

00:31:34.600 consensus of Nobel laureates is often a very good guide to the best state of the evidence,

00:31:39.860 right? I mean, that's shorthand for finding the best evidence and the best arguments.

00:31:44.280 Sure.

00:31:44.500 But by the way, I just would say one other thing, which is that the, what I think a lot

00:31:49.340 of people aren't aware of, but, you know, I do believe that when something becomes very

00:31:55.600 fetid on your, what is roughly your political side, you should call it out, identify it.

00:32:02.740 It's very difficult to do this, of course, at the moment, because there was a movement on

00:32:05.800 the right in America and elsewhere, which says that anything that is gatekeeping is demonstrably

00:32:13.800 bad. And therefore let's lift all of the sluice, all of the sewer sluices and let it, let all the 0.70

00:32:23.100 shit run. And I think it's worth identifying one other thing, which I don't know you're probably 0.94

00:32:28.700 aware of, but a lot of people aren't, which is that there has always been a reason why a type of

00:32:34.440 American right-wing figure will play with this stuff. And it's slightly different to the reason

00:32:41.620 why you get the same stuff on, for instance, the continent of Europe. On the continent of Europe,

00:32:48.300 when this dark game is played about World War II, what they try to do is to, they demonstrate they

00:32:56.700 cannot contend with the utter atrocity of Nazi fascism and try in the end to either downplay it 0.82

00:33:06.700 and upplay Soviet communism in some zero-sum game, which is never going to end well. Try to get around 0.56

00:33:14.660 the mountain of the Holocaust and in the end find a way to absolve their country's history of this. 0.93

00:33:21.940 And I understand this, but it's also lamentable because they have to contend with the histories of

00:33:27.860 collaboration and fascism and much more. One of the reasons, again, why in an incredibly British way, 0.85

00:33:34.480 I reassert that the fact that some of us historically, our countries didn't do that. So I'll have the right

00:33:39.660 to feel some pride for that. But the thing on the American right that's always existed on this is

00:33:44.600 that World War II was a catastrophe to enter into, as was World War I, because America should have let 1.00

00:33:52.440 the Nazis and the Soviets battle it out, and we didn't need to get involved. And that's the dream. 0.98

00:34:00.480 I mean, that itself is an interesting revisionist exercise, and it's one that's happened for years.

00:34:07.200 I saw Pat Buchanan argue this years ago when he had a book out, very unconvincingly, but it was stimulating

00:34:12.480 in a way, and stimulating to see him prove wrong. But in any case, that's a game, because as Clive James

00:34:19.760 used to say, we're here because history happened. There's a sort of limit to which you can play this book.

00:34:25.320 So why do you want to play it? You want to play that dark game because you want to get onto a

00:34:29.600 different game now. Yeah. There's also, I don't know if you have the same degree of conspiracy

00:34:35.720 thinking in the continental version of this. I mean, yes, the Jews are often at the bottom of

00:34:42.940 many conspiracy theories going back over a hundred years, but it seems to me that there's an appetite

00:34:49.540 for conspiracy thinking in America now. Again, I locate the epicenter of this somewhere near Joe's

00:34:56.520 podcast, unfortunately. That is, I mean, it is being, you know, algorithmically boosted to a degree that

00:35:02.920 it seems in danger of subsuming everything else. It's a complete disaster because, of course,

00:35:08.480 people need to hold in their heads the thing that some things that are called conspiracy theories

00:35:12.820 turn out to be true. Right.

00:35:14.400 The COVID lab leak, obvious example, obvious example in recent time, and it fell apart in

00:35:19.480 recent time. But when you look at the fact that, for instance, a majority of Americans believe the

00:35:23.640 CIA was involved in the assassination of JFK, President Trump releases the last JFK files. And

00:35:29.780 to the amazement of many, it seems that the man who the Dallas police fingered for this a few hours

00:35:37.760 after the assassination of the president was the person. Might have actually done it.

00:35:42.060 Was the person who did it. And the man, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had a gun that his wife

00:35:47.180 noticed was missing that morning from the house, and who, when the police come to her house, say,

00:35:53.500 was it my husband who did it? It seems like probably Lee Harvey that did it. And that,

00:35:58.520 you know, the one member of staff of the book depository who was heard to be firing rounds on

00:36:04.500 the floor above, and was the only person to run out of the book depository immediately after the

00:36:09.220 shooting, may have done the shooting.

00:36:11.840 Yeah. And the shooting, which was supposedly was impossible for one man to accomplish, but

00:36:16.700 has been replicated by several shooters.

00:36:19.340 You know, that no sharpshooter could possibly do this, but it's demonstrated. And Lee Harvey

00:36:24.140 Oswald was a practiced sharpshooter. But it just goes on and on. But my point is simply that I made

00:36:30.020 this point a little while ago about Bobby Kennedy Jr., which is, I said, you know, if I was living in a

00:36:35.780 country where I honestly believed that my father and my uncle, two of the most important people in

00:36:41.420 the country, had been assassinated by the government, I think I'd hot-footed out of the

00:36:47.460 country quite fast. I think it's a dangerous place to be. I think that just, so that's just one,

00:36:53.980 but you can do this on multiple areas of American public life. Look, America is the only country

00:37:00.240 where the citizens are encouraged to generate conspiracy theories about America's successes.

00:37:08.620 Look at the moon landing. Right.

00:37:10.520 On the great successes of American engineering and exploration, and significant chunks of the

00:37:18.100 American public do not believe that America did this. Yeah.

00:37:21.860 And one of the things, by the way, that's fascinating about that is if you speak to Russians who grew up

00:37:26.660 under Soviet communism, where you were lied to about everything, everything was a lie.

00:37:33.920 This year's crops are particularly good, always a lie. But even in that world of lies,

00:37:41.200 they didn't think that you're a Gagarin didn't go up into space because they were proud of it and

00:37:47.380 they wanted it to be the case. So I do think, and I know now that now I can predict there will be a

00:37:53.180 flurry of, ah, you haven't seen the way in which the, the flag holds up and the shadows are in the

00:37:59.580 wrong direction. The shadows are in the wrong direction and all this. I can, I can imagine the

00:38:03.380 inbox now, but Joe used to be one of those guys. And I gather he reversed course because he, he ended

00:38:08.980 up recognizing that America couldn't have got away with faking the moon landing because the Soviets 0.96

00:38:15.000 would have exposed it. Yeah. That's a nice counterpoint. All right. So I want to get to your book

00:38:19.940 and we're not leaving the current topic because the goal here is to make the case that the, the

00:38:27.600 moral confusion you were up against in that podcast interview is, um, is as bewildering as, uh, your,

00:38:33.740 uh, temper suggested. I mean, it was just the moral high ground is so obvious here and the, the wider

00:38:42.100 concern. I mean, that, that it's one thing to view this as Israel, its specific history with the

00:38:47.620 Palestinians, its right to exist, the legitimacy of Zionism and get sort of wrapped around the axle 1.00

00:38:53.840 of all of those specifics. It's another to actually look at the conflict in Gaza and in Israel's

00:39:01.460 history generally as part of this larger picture of a jihadist and Islamist conflict with the West,

00:39:07.840 which is what I tend to do. Um, now that you're, you know, your book doesn't focus on that, but it's,

00:39:12.000 it's important to keep that in view and it becomes incredibly clear where the moral high ground is when

00:39:17.380 you look at the details. But let me just, before I let you run, I want to, I want to point out that

00:39:22.020 there are two very different lenses through which people look at this conflict and, and they explain

00:39:27.480 the impossibility of discussion. The lens that certainly Dave Smith and his fans have here is

00:39:35.000 that the extremity of Hamas's violence demonstrates the immensity of Palestinian suffering. I mean, the,

00:39:42.840 like the fact that they would behave this way, it can only be attributed to the fact that they've

00:39:49.360 been pushed past the point of sanity by the Israelis, right? So in some strange way, the onus for the 1.00

00:39:55.860 atrocities of October 7th and other atrocities, the sort that you saw during the second intifada,

00:40:00.700 uh, and this reasoning gets mapped onto jihadist atrocities everywhere. The onus gets put on the

00:40:07.100 victims of the atrocities. And this is a point that Paul Berman made brilliantly 20 years ago in his book,

00:40:12.840 terror and liberalism. So there's that, that weird distortion, the opposite way of seeing this. And

00:40:18.540 I'm convinced and have been convinced for more than 20 years as, as the true one is that jihadism 0.99

00:40:23.860 is an independent variable. And you can, I mean, you can find this death cult behavior in people who

00:40:30.260 have been immiserated by occupations and been treated badly. And you can find it in people who have not

00:40:35.740 been immiserated. And so it's the, it's the ideas that give you the death cult. And conversely,

00:40:41.660 you can find people who have been treated far worse than the Palestinians and they never 0.98

00:40:46.120 manufacture an endless supply of suicide bombers. So it's the ideas, it's the culture. And, uh, you

00:40:53.520 know, so, you know, the, the most glaring, uh, scotoma in, you know, Dave Smith's non-expertise

00:40:59.620 is a complete failure to appreciate the reality of jihadism and just what Israel is actually dealing

00:41:04.460 with in Hamas. I believe that it's also a strain of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, 0.68

00:41:10.760 which is a belief that nobody in the world can do something wrong and bad unless we have somehow

00:41:17.400 pushed them to it. Yes. This is Noam Chomsky's gift to our politics. Yes. Yes. It used to be on

00:41:22.600 the left and now it's on the right as well. Yeah. This is a profound and deep anti-Americanism,

00:41:28.160 which I cannot sign up for and will not profound anti-Westernism sees the world. Actually, funnily

00:41:34.720 enough, Edward Said, to the extent that his theory on Orientalism holds at all, might've

00:41:40.500 found this trend interesting of Westerners now looking at the rest of the world and saying,

00:41:45.960 they're just, they can't do anything unless we make them. Right. Totally without any

00:41:50.600 robs agency of all the people you would otherwise give agency. No moral agency. And if there is an

00:41:55.400 explanation for why somebody goes and blows themselves up and everyone that they can kill

00:42:00.740 on a bus in Jerusalem, it's because of something to do with British mandate policy 80 years earlier.

00:42:10.260 I completely reject this and I reject it for many reasons. But one is that riding shotgun with the

00:42:17.520 claim that only the West, only America can lead anyone to do bad things is what you rightly 1.00

00:42:23.880 identify, Sam, as the utter inability to recognize that some people seek utterly different things

00:42:32.720 than we do. I, um, you remember there was a story some years ago that seemed to me to be emblematic.

00:42:38.500 I must look it up again. I think it was what you reported in the New York Times of an American

00:42:42.040 couple, a nice, nice couple. I don't wish to make any sort of laughs at their expense, but, uh,

00:42:47.260 they decided to give up their job somewhere in San Francisco and cycle around the world and they

00:42:52.560 kept a blog and the aim was that they wanted to show their belief that essentially everyone in the

00:42:57.220 world wants what they did, which is, you know, security, comfort, wellbeing, happiness, a bit of

00:43:04.500 money to bring up your kids well, and, uh, you know, love and peace. And it, uh, their, uh, their journey

00:43:11.360 log ends, um, when they're cycling through, I think it was Uzbekistan. And unfortunately for them,

00:43:16.200 a truckload of ISIS fighters are driving the other way. I can't believe their luck that there

00:43:20.820 were these two Americans on a tandem and stop and, uh, torture and kill them. And that's where their 0.99

00:43:28.120 story ended. I use it because as an example, because it's a particularly unpleasant one, but

00:43:33.780 emblematic of a total failure of imagination or, or study for many people in the West who do not

00:43:41.980 realize that when it comes to what I'd call the death cult ideology, which has manifested on the

00:43:46.800 right and the left in history, it manifested in Spain in the 1930s with the Frank West chanting to

00:43:53.360 Miguel de Unamuno, you know, vive la muerte, long live death. And, you know, the great Spanish

00:43:59.660 philosopher of his era realizes his life, his work is just done because it's over because he's in front

00:44:06.000 of, he's at a university in front of a group of young men chanting long live death. And this, it's

00:44:11.100 over, it's over. Reason and rationalism will no longer work. Well, the death cult of art that I write

00:44:17.380 about here is a death cult of Hamas that really could have not done what it did. And as I say in one 0.96

00:44:24.640 of the, you know, passages in the book, you know, after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, there was

00:44:30.280 a Palestinian state in Gaza. They were even encouraged to have elections by the George W. Bush

00:44:36.940 administration, Condoleezza Rice and others. They had elections. They voted in Hamas, which states

00:44:42.520 that it's a genocidal terrorist organization, which wants the annihilation of the Jewish race and then 0.98

00:44:47.900 get onto everyone else. They voted in Hamas. Hamas immediately used the billions of dollars that 0.98

00:44:53.160 came in to make sure they built up a terror infrastructure tunnel systems, not for the citizens of

00:44:58.380 Gaza, but for the rockets and for their fighters, kept on importing rockets and other military hardware

00:45:04.600 to fire at Israel. And after many iterations of the war in 2023, 4,000 of their terrorists flood into 0.98

00:45:19.260 Israel and massacre their way through the South. This is, this is the fruit of Hamas. This is what 0.98

00:45:25.900 Hamas wanted as well as leadership wanted. And they do not want to live in peace and coexistence. 0.78

00:45:31.940 They want to murder and slaughter, and they even want to die themselves. And I think that, I mean,

00:45:38.920 we're hitting, sitting here in LA, why would anyone in Los Angeles understand this? Like we, it's just,

00:45:48.140 I mean, you do, but we had 9-11, we had our own, insofar as you're a student of the news. I mean,

00:45:53.600 this is of a piece with what happened in Paris on multiple occasions, the Bataclan most horrifically,

00:46:00.100 in your country, the Manchester bombing. I mean, this is, this is just, I mean, we memory hole it

00:46:06.680 and other things, other bright, shiny objects capture our attention, but it's the same species

00:46:11.180 of confusion and anti-Western bias that caused people to blame the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for

00:46:19.900 getting, having the indecency of getting murdered by jihadists. And then you had the Penn America 0.86

00:46:24.440 Foundation, you know, rescind the award that they were going to give them and for, you know, for

00:46:29.940 courage. I mean, this confusion is everywhere. I want to actually just draw a few bright lines

00:46:36.780 where people can see them to show the moral high ground here. So there's just some striking

00:46:41.480 differences between the two sides that you elucidate in your book. I mean, one is that one side takes

00:46:46.760 hostages, even young children and old women, and it's community. It's, you know, the non

00:46:54.260 combatants receive these hostages, not with looks of horror, but with, you know, open celebration,

00:47:02.920 right? It's like, it is completely intelligible from a cultural standpoint within Gaza that this

00:47:10.160 is exactly what you do. This is, the good is on your side for stealing these infants and young

00:47:16.080 children and old women and forcing them underground for years at a stretch. One side uses its own 0.95

00:47:23.280 civilians as human shields. One side murders its civilians when they try to flee to safety.

00:47:30.360 And if you try to flip this, if you try to imagine the other side, that is the Israelis doing any of 0.99

00:47:36.900 these things, it's obviously unthinkable. And anyone who is standing in criticism of their behavior,

00:47:45.220 I think, still wouldn't go so far as to imagine that the people of Tel Aviv are capable of using their

00:47:51.720 own women and children as human shields, right? Or that they would celebrate, you know, that the IDF 0.64

00:47:57.500 would want to seek to maximize civilian casualties on its own side. I mean, even that is not as confused

00:48:04.380 as people are. No one, it seems to me, is confused about that. And yet they don't see the relevance of

00:48:09.120 these differences.

00:48:10.380 There's lots of reasons. One is they don't want to. If you were supporting a side that turned out to have done

00:48:17.220 October the 7th, and some people say to me, oh, no, no, no, the world's sympathies with Israel. No, they weren't.

00:48:22.800 No, some of the world's sympathies were briefly with Israel. But in London, on the evening of the 7th,

00:48:30.160 hundreds of people gathered in the streets of Knightsbridge to wave flares and celebrate the ongoing massacre.

00:48:36.780 On the 8th of October, I relate in the book that I was in Times Square to see a pro-Hamas protest as the massacre

00:48:45.000 was still going on. This started very early. And we get back to that strange collection of simultaneous thoughts

00:48:54.700 that people can have. Hamas GoPros and records and Instagrams their atrocities. And their followers can, 0.81

00:49:03.420 it's another one of these double moves, these jiu-jitsu moves, these, um, they, they say,

00:49:09.520 how thrilled they are about the atrocities. And also the atrocities didn't happen. And that then

00:49:15.840 the third move is the atrocities are actually carried out by the other side. You set your watch

00:49:20.560 and you'll see it. Um, last year there was a claim that IDF soldiers had gone into Gaza and were raping

00:49:26.060 the women of Gaza. There were many reasons why this is completely implausible and not just implausible,

00:49:31.580 but deeply offensive. But all these people who said, who were relating this, repeating this smear

00:49:38.840 of the Israeli defense forces, were all the people who were denying that Hamas had raped women on the 0.88

00:49:46.360 7th. There's a muppet of a journalist, not only a journalist, a sort of commentator, agitator in the UK,

00:49:52.480 who passed around the libel that the IDF was raping women in Gaza, who, when he saw a version

00:49:58.940 of the 43 minute atrocity video, came out of it and reviewed it by saying it was disappointing because

00:50:05.300 you didn't actually see any women being raped and therefore it seems unlikely any rapes occurred.

00:50:11.460 This is one of my, this has become, as you know, I call it Grossman's law now after Vasily Grossman.

00:50:17.060 This is this thing of, tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you what you're guilty of. 0.98

00:50:22.480 Absolutely 100% application of this law. The side that says it's both good to kill babies and 1.00

00:50:32.020 denies that they kill babies, then attack the IDF and IAF for killing babies. It's everywhere this 0.98

00:50:39.080 form of projection, I suppose, which is one of the things it is. And it's deliberate desire to not

00:50:47.940 recognize the difference between deliberately maximizing civilian casualties, as Hamas did on

00:50:54.980 the 7th, and deliberately trying to minimize them, as the IDF has. If the IDF had wanted to

00:51:00.440 carry out a genocide in Gaza, it could have done. They were accused of having a genocide in the Gaza

00:51:04.960 since 2005, which is weird because the population doubled after 2005 up to 2023. But then it's not like

00:51:12.720 consistency is particularly important, it seems, in this era. After all, the same people who claim

00:51:17.000 that, who say that there is a genocide in Gaza are the same people who say, why don't the Israelis 0.99

00:51:24.580 realize that they are operating militarily in an area with a disproportionate number of people under

00:51:31.120 the age of 21?

00:51:31.980 You have a line in your book, forgive me if I don't get it verbatim, but it was something like,

00:51:38.260 how do you fight an army that wants to maximize the loss of life on its own side?

00:51:45.760 Right. I mean, this is, it is, people don't, it seems to me, make contact with how, one, how just

00:51:53.040 morally perverse that situation is, but two, what an insuperable obstacle it is to actually practically

00:51:59.360 fighting a war so as to minimize the loss of civilian life.

00:52:02.840 I mean, hundreds and hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed in the last 18 months because

00:52:09.440 they are going methodically and in exceptionally dangerous situations, house to house in areas of

00:52:17.740 Gaza that are meant to have been cleared of everyone but Hamas fighters. Hundreds and hundreds of young

00:52:22.960 Israeli men primarily have been killed by, instead of carpet bombing an area, going

00:52:28.800 assiduously through it, at enormous personal risk. They have, every soldier you speak to

00:52:37.260 has the same stories of, for instance, people coming out of a civilian area with their hands in the air,

00:52:46.400 and then from their midst, a group of Hamas terrorists come dressed exactly the same as the

00:52:51.260 civilians and start firing at the soldiers. In the knowledge that the soldiers either have to just

00:52:56.860 receive the incoming fire and lose their own lives, or they have to fire back and risk killing some of

00:53:03.820 the civilians that Hamas has so gleefully sprung out among. None of this is just, all of this is what 0.96

00:53:13.060 every soldier has faced for the last 18 months, every single one. And Hamas's leadership, say,

00:53:20.680 there was an interview on Al-Arabir the other month with one of the remaining leaders of Hamas,

00:53:26.820 who was asked, if the Israeli airstrikes from the air that you describe are so devastating,

00:53:31.380 why don't you allow the citizens of Gaza to shelter in your very extensive tunnel system?

00:53:36.600 And his reply was, because the tunnel system is not for the civilians of Gaza. The tunnels are for our 0.98

00:53:42.640 rockets and ammunition and for our fighters. And asked who should build shelters for the

00:53:50.300 citizens of Gaza. He said the international community, that's their responsibility,

00:53:53.980 the international community. But I have-

00:53:56.520 There's the same community that gave them billions and billions of dollars to build those tunnels

00:53:59.860 effectively over 18 years.

00:54:01.980 And I have a genuine, genuine offer I'll put out there. I can't attach a cash prize this time,

00:54:08.780 but I'll- this is a completely sincere offer to anyone listening to pick me up on the following

00:54:14.780 challenge. Your listenership, I'm sure, Sam, is intelligent enough to understand what it is to

00:54:21.000 extrapolate out civilian or other casualties by ratio of population. Not everyone gets me on this.

00:54:26.720 But of course, Israel is a country of 9 million people. America is a country of about 340 million.

00:54:31.880 30, 40 million people. Nobody knows how many people there are in the UK, so it doesn't work

00:54:36.060 there. But-

00:54:37.180 Well, we soon won't know how many people are in America, given all the doging, but- 0.98

00:54:41.680 Well, but the, but, so, and again, just preempting any of the morons who want to claim that I'm 0.96

00:54:50.900 saying that a Jewish life is worth 10 American lives or anything like that. No, it's extrapolating 0.96

00:54:56.220 out from population. So, if October the 7th had happened in America by proportion of population,

00:55:00.880 it would have been 44,000 Americans murdered and burned alive in their homes in one day,

00:55:06.060 and another 10,000 Americans taken hostage. So, my challenge is, whether in Gaza with 1,200

00:55:15.120 civilians in Israel murdered and 250 taken hostage, and the two stated war aims of the Israeli government,

00:55:22.620 the return of all the hostages and the destruction or capture of all of Hamas's leadership and fighting

00:55:27.840 brigades, whether it's in the case of Israel trying to carry out this operation of rescue

00:55:32.840 and so on in Gaza, or whether it would be how America would get back 10,000 hostages in an

00:55:42.220 equally built up, intensely booby-trapped terrain. If anyone watching has a battle plan for how to do

00:55:50.180 that, send it to me, and I will send it to everybody I know in Israel. Because I'm sure that if there is 0.99

00:55:57.960 a military genius watching and listening who knows how you would carry out that operation with no

00:56:03.740 civilian casualties on the side of the Gazans and minimal to no casualties on the side of the IDF,

00:56:11.440 I can assure anyone watching. I and many others will be all ears. But I hear no such thing. I hear

00:56:19.800 no such thing. The best I've had, I think it came up in that Rogan debate, the best I've heard is

00:56:25.920 the hostages that have been released have been released by getting around a table and negotiating.

00:56:32.500 Horseshed said by people who don't know what they're talking about. The only reason Hamas has 0.99

00:56:38.740 released any of the hostages to date, including the dead bodies of babies, is because of the kinetic

00:56:44.560 military force exercised for 18 months by the young men and women of the IDF. Only military pressure

00:56:51.060 has made Hamas give any of the hostages back. They would all still be sitting in underground tunnels

00:56:57.960 and in the basements of Al Jazeera journalists and much more if there had been no military action

00:57:05.300 in Gaza. Sinwar would still be alive if the IDF had not painstakingly fought in Gaza for a year.

00:57:16.020 People simply do not understand this. And when they say things like, but wouldn't it,

00:57:21.560 why don't the Israelis just get around the table with Hamas? I'm afraid you completely demonstrate, 0.98

00:57:26.780 you know, nothing about Hamas.

00:57:29.060 Yeah. Yeah. What do you think Israel's policy should be going forward around hostages? I know 0.64

00:57:35.200 this is difficult for you to answer, perhaps, given the fact that you know many of these families,

00:57:40.820 but I can only imagine that there are very few people in Israel now who think that the Gilad

00:57:47.340 Shalit deal was wise in retrospect. That was the, you might summarize what that was, but that was the, 0.82

00:57:53.880 I think the 1,027 terrorists to one hostage exchange that freed Sinwar to mastermind October 7th.

00:58:02.880 That piece of history looks, you know, increasingly untenable. And I mean, given the understandable

00:58:09.280 pressure brought to bear by the hostage families throughout this war, given the fact that the

00:58:14.080 leverage is undeniable, once you have hostages, you have leverage. How do you, how does this get

00:58:19.440 broken in the future?

00:58:21.500 Let me preempt that by saying that there are similar cases around. I was, when I was reporting

00:58:26.360 from Ukraine recently, I was, among other things, interviewing families and children who had been,

00:58:33.000 behind the enemy lines, had been in a territory captured by Putin's forces. And it's thought that

00:58:39.640 around 20,000 Ukrainian children have effectively been kidnapped by Putin and the Russians. This

00:58:45.080 includes people in orphanages, but it also includes children that were encouraged to go to summer camps,

00:58:49.640 and their parents sent to summer camps and then would disappear. I found out something very interesting

00:58:53.960 the other week when I was looking into this story and trying to bring some more light to it, which

00:58:57.720 is that there was, there seems to me to have been an almost deliberate attempt to the Ukrainian side

00:59:03.080 not to maximize this story. Right.

00:59:05.640 Because, and this is a, this is something of a supposition speaking to some of the people

00:59:10.920 campaigning for the kidnap children, that the Zelensky government knew that the minute that it is

00:59:17.080 about getting the children back, you will get intolerable pressure from your domestic population 0.93

00:59:22.360 because anything is worth it to get the children home. It's a, it's just a terrible, terrible thing.

00:59:28.920 And I suspect that some of their thinking on that has been influenced by watching the Israelis being 0.72

00:59:34.360 pushed into this intolerable position. It's incredibly hard in Israel because not only is there the, the

00:59:42.280 religious edict to fight for life and that this is one of the commandments central to the faith,

00:59:50.280 but it is also a commandment that then is central to the state. Everybody, when they join the army,

00:59:56.840 the air force or anything, everyone fight, flying a dangerous raid over enemy territory is told if

01:00:03.800 something happens, we will come and get you back. We'll come and get you back. We tear up the earth

01:00:08.600 to get our people back. Everybody in the IDF, no, no man left behind, no man left behind in the

01:00:14.520 battlefield. And so Hamas like Hezbollah know that that is the Israeli view that they put an exceptionally 0.93

01:00:21.880 high price on life. And by the way, that isn't just the life of Jews to preempt one inevitable line of 1.00

01:00:29.880 attack. It is literally to get back every Israeli and the Israelis who have been captured, by the way, 0.80

01:00:37.320 included Bedouin, Arabs, Druze, Druze, and others. It's, it's, it's, it's, but so, but it's agonizing.

01:00:47.560 It is completely agonizing as Hamas knew it would be. Some families of the hostages refused to engage in

01:00:55.240 the, um, in the hostage families forum and it's, uh, it's work because they said, we know, and our

01:01:03.080 child knew, and sometimes the child had left a message saying, please don't swap me. It's not

01:01:09.800 worth it. Other, other families will suffer. And they really do. I mean, uh, there was a, uh, in one

01:01:15.560 of the swaps I, I, myself having, you know, spent all this time there and getting to know so many

01:01:21.320 people involved victims and, um, families and more. I myself had one the other month where

01:01:28.920 one of the hostages released was someone whose family I know well. Um, one of the terrorists

01:01:36.200 released in swap from the Israeli side was a man who killed the brother of a friend of mine in

01:01:43.080 Israel some years ago. So one family is celebrating, you know, way, which you just, it's like a miracle.

01:01:51.640 Yeah. You cannot begrudge that. And on the other hand, there's a family who knows that their loved

01:01:57.880 one's killer is, is free after only a few years in prison. So this is all just horrible. And it's

01:02:05.320 deliberately horrible because Hamas makes it. So the torture porn, they push out on videos, 0.89

01:02:11.720 videos, videoing hostages, watching the release of other hostages in order to double, double up the

01:02:17.800 pressure. But interviewing a hostage, they're releasing, knowing that his family has been

01:02:24.600 killed, but he doesn't know it. Yeah. That was, uh, it's every permutation of this.

01:02:29.960 Yes. He got, he got back. The Beaver's father gets back, believes cause he's been separated from his

01:02:35.320 wife and kids and they must be alive. And then finally is released from over a year of torture and

01:02:40.920 deprivation in the underground tunnels of Hamas, and then discovers that both his babies and his

01:02:46.840 wife dead. But I think if, if memory serves, I think they asked him on camera, whether he was

01:02:52.040 looking forward to seeing his family, knowing the status of his family. That's right. That's right.

01:02:56.360 I can't, it can't be understood enough. This from the Western viewpoint that the reason I use the term

01:03:04.840 death cults is that some people, some groups literally worship death, glorify in death. They

01:03:13.160 love death. We love death more than you love life. Yeah. That, that has to be taken at face value.

01:03:19.640 Yes. And as Nasrallah said, uh, in 2004, he said the great weakness of the infidel is their love of

01:03:28.040 life and we will use it against them. But as you know, that's one of the things I meditate on in this

01:03:34.120 book is what is the answer to that? Because for much of my life, I thought it was almost unanswerable.

01:03:39.160 What do you do against a movement that not only glorifies in your death, but glorifies in the deaths

01:03:45.320 of their own side and sometimes in the deaths of their own family, like Ishmael Hanir, who finds

01:03:49.880 out that his sons, all Hamas leaders have been killed in an airstrike.

01:03:53.080 You know, we have the video, we can see his reaction to that knowledge.

01:03:56.120 He's happy. Yeah.

01:03:57.480 He's happy.

01:03:58.440 So this is a piece that I think it's very difficult for people to understand, especially secular people.

01:04:03.240 And it's, it's easy for us to allied or seem to allied in our description of this phenomenon as

01:04:09.160 being evil or as being an expression of hate, because it's, it's worse than that.

01:04:14.040 I actually think jihadism, I think there's something worse than evil. I'm not saying

01:04:18.040 that there isn't evil to be found here and there, or that there isn't hate to be found here, but

01:04:22.760 misguided religious exaltation, misguided religious triumphalism allows for actually psychologically

01:04:33.080 normal and otherwise compassionate people to be part of a death cult. And I, and I, so I was reading

01:04:39.960 in your book and I had this thought that the framing, the evil framing was somehow not capturing

01:04:45.400 what I was worried about here. And I've been worried about it again for now going on something

01:04:49.640 like 25 years. And I remembered that I saw an ISIS video. This had to have been at least 10 years

01:04:55.160 ago, maybe 2014 of ISIS members throwing gay men or, or, and, and boys or men and boys who they claimed 0.90

01:05:03.960 were gay off of rooftops. And I think they were also toppling walls. These are like, these are 0.70

01:05:08.760 traditional punishments. But I remember seeing some video where there was actual tenderness being

01:05:17.080 expressed by the ISIS fighters toward the people they were about to kill. Like I remember seeing,

01:05:23.720 and I wasn't sure whether I hallucinated this, I, or that, you know, just that it was, you know,

01:05:27.960 fabricated the memory. I remember seeing the, like the reassurance, like, it's going to be okay,

01:05:33.000 bro. Like, like we have to do this to you, but you say the Shahada and you're going to, going to be

01:05:36.440 fine. Right. Like, like there was, it was not an, clearly not an expression of hatred. And just before

01:05:41.000 this, I, I did a search. I couldn't find the video, but I found a still from what I am sure is the

01:05:46.280 video. And I want you to look at this because there's so much contained in this image. Yes.

01:05:52.760 Now the vibe, the vibe being communicated by the two people who have hands on that man's shoulder,

01:05:59.640 right, is not hatred, right? Everyone you see there is an ISIS fighter and the man who's in a hood is

01:06:06.640 about to be hurled off a rooftop, right? There's something more disturbing about this for me than mere

01:06:14.520 evil. Again, the evil is there. I mean, I have no doubt that Sinwar was a psychopath and, you know,

01:06:20.120 a sadist, and we have a tremendous amount of testimony on that point, much of which you give 0.73

01:06:25.080 in the book. But what is worse is that it's possible for a death cult ideology to subsume

01:06:32.360 the values of even good people, right? Even normal people. Once you recognize that these people

01:06:40.440 actually believe that they know the moral structure of the universe and how to live within it,

01:06:45.480 and they know there's one way to get to paradise. And that's the only thing that matters. And this

01:06:51.320 world is worthless, right? This is just an antechamber to either hell or paradise. And the only thing that

01:06:57.340 matters is that you're going to the right place. Then I think we're in the presence of a very different

01:07:02.840 phenomenon, which is quite a bit scarier. I mean, what is scary is that when you think of something

01:07:08.360 like the NOVA music festival, which you write about in such a searing way in the book, I mean,

01:07:13.800 that for me crystallizes this collision between Western freedom and tolerance and compassion.

01:07:20.920 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

01:07:24.920 samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast.

01:07:31.320 The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a

01:07:35.880 subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free

01:07:41.320 and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 20, 2025

#410 — The Whole Catastrophe

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript