Joe Rogan Experience #410 — Sam Harris Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Tell me what's up. For folks who were just tuning in on Ustream, we just started talking about Sam Harris, the big fat Islamophobe. with no problems whatsoever. Make fun of And so it's important to be mindful of that, obviously. you're accused of bigotry and you're put right next to Michelle Bachman I mean, they got mad at Patton Oswald for making a joke

3:06 was totally praiseworthy of her. I said, she's the best thing to come out of the Muslim world religions are the same and that all religions are the same and And then there's a much vaster number of people around them who support them, who are not jihadists, but who are basically aligned with them in terms of their worldview. is just unthinkable now.

6:25 and people start burning embassies, They were totally benign cartoons. Or you just hate women. but just there's a handful of main ones we care about but yeah the main ones we care about okay and that's essentially what they're doing by calling you islamophobic yeah they're endorsing That, one, you have extremists in every religion and they all misbehave, or bad people will do bad things anyway, and religion is always a pretext.

10:10 if we actually believe this. It doesn't matter what other opportunities you have in life. That is a crime punishable by death. You can say, well, the person has to speak out against the faith. That is fine with us. and it's a dangerous one. that we really believe that someone actually wrote this stuff down from the divine, fiction author he made a science fiction religion I mean it's really beautiful in

13:45 worldview prescribes lots of benign things. I mean, so if you think God told in there. But there's no way to say we're going to, we as Muslims or as Christians, You're not even supposed to use a magic marker. But you read the Koran, it's a much more unified document. Yeah. she's like you don't know if you don't know how do you sleep at night right for her like someone

17:00 Ex-Mormons are awesome because there's no group of people that are more energetic in their atheism than I've met than ex-Mormons because they're coming out of this thing that is just so obviously made up. to live their life on. They can't just free ball it. They can't just go, who knows, All you have to do is believe the right things in the meantime and not screw up too badly

19:44 Your tears are wasted. learning how to grieve. They're not learning how to teach their children to grieve. They're not She was upset. Why didn't I get this? through the internet, and through the access of information, it seems to me that we're slowly No one ever goes, we're good. build society on. That may be true. I happen to think that religion, most of what explains religion, is just more

25:12 me here. If I thought that I had transcribed the address wrong, that belief would have and it is in the process of doing it. that faith is something we're hopefully getting over. We're going to have to get over it because You're going to be tempted to rely on prayer for your children. thinks that their belief in paradise is true. Christians have done under the ages of Christianity, occasionally you can point to something in the doctrine of Christianity that seems to be the

29:52 Everyone was a Christian. god of Abraham. that ethics was going to show up anyway. kill other chimps who are not part of their tribe if they happen to outnumber them. And who sees no basis for collaboration. You don't feel empathy for other people. You either The guy who got on the bus and shot Malala in the head for wanting to go to school, that's essentially what happened.

35:30 So, I mean, look at Nazi Germany. refused to collaborate. But I mean, this is one of the scary features of the human mind. It's I don't want to assume that I know nothing about this particular person. They're far more functional people than that. And we're not very useful in that circumstance. I mean, leave aside for the moment that we actually don't know what to do.

39:34 I see what you're saying. because he was urinating on a dead insurgent. But you don't get one without the other. there's a thing about sexuality that I always found really odd. You can't watch sex, but you religious norms hammered into it. And yeah, it's always been strange to think that very explicit violence is just acceptable entertainment. Well, just whether you can't get one without the other.

43:12 And we don't see – we just don't see that the – there is kind of a zero-sum game here operating in the background, It's not a real imperative. So when I get a mailing from a charity, help another person who's near starvation in East Africa, where what we all seem to justify to ourselves Clearly, it's our responsibility to figure out. And yet we don't have the mechanisms in place to make it friction-free for us to feel the

46:53 that number up totally yeah it's probably right it's not not far off it's probably right um but It's okay to be a coward. a guy with a knife. And especially in the original case, the Kitty Genovese case, where that notion of diffusion of responsibility was coined, you had a guy with a knife stabbing a woman to death on a sidewalk over the course of many minutes, and there were many witnesses.

49:44 You know, the innocent bystander, with another human being who wants to hurt you. And they started arguing. And then as soon as the bus moved, he was unconscious. lower levels in fights But the truth is you don't even, I'm not going to go near that guy. 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.

52:43 If everyone rushed the guy, some people would get shot, you're talking about in competition yeah yeah in competition and competition. And conflict is fucking terrifying for people. That's the moment for you to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. if everyone's just running away or clinging to the exits, Teach people to compete. you know, of insecurity. I think a far better one is not being insecure, learning that the actual

56:27 often but I would roll them and you would feel them panicking you'd feel They know how to do it. you're actually not ever having your skills confirmed or disconfirmed because it's all in this domain of fantasy But there is something toxic about training in an art And tapping him out. So you have this hierarchy that is never – but they didn't take advantage of the cult.

1:00:10 And she wanted to do it at the school because I was teaching at the time. You know, I mean, I had a locked key to a building yeah and no one was there and we could just bang it out no problem there's couches there was no problems i was like nope we can't do it here you know, I've been wasting time. Like I'm doing something, like I had to revamp my whole

1:01:34 even if I wasn't the best kicker or puncher, it was uh very important because i could quit oh yeah i could quit then i could have said you know This guy just manhandled me. It's probably true for anyone, It's a guy whose background I never totally believed. But I felt like I knew a lot about how to defend myself. There's nothing like gassing under that kind of pressure when you have no idea what to do

1:04:17 I don't know who he's under. That's one of the, without a doubt, one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. You know, it's like, whoa. Try to hang on. It's just a bunch of guys swimming around the ground like they don't understand it i remember based on listening to the commentary. you know, you see those videos online where guys throw their hand at people

1:06:36 this guy's 250 fucking pounds the other guy's 170 soaking wet built like a popsicle stick You control someone's ability to harm you. and you want to do it in a way where the violence is truly incremental, where you can turn it up as slowly as the You may knock them out. You may knock them out and have them hit their head on the curb and die. The guy swings a punch, he connects on the jaw, and that's a wrap.

1:08:46 You have to secure it. that he was training under before he found jiu-jitsu And he was going to come back and tell everybody he went to China and learned some qigong. I mean, even at distances of 20 feet, you've got people writhing in pain and flopping around. Do we have a video? at a distance of 20 feet, and then he issues this It just throws them off.

1:12:00 Because this is the guy who's got a, so you see his skills. You could see how he would believe this. He gets so confused when he gets hit. you can see the look on his face. Just imagine if he got in there with... He grabbed his gi and just started wailing on him in the face. That's it right there. Yeah. And yet this is possible. Some people are not hypnotizable.

1:16:52 meet people, I mean, one of my favorite conversations with a former person of faith on this stuff, and people just can't clear because it's just too painful to acknowledge. Was it Letters to a Christian Nation? Simply by not lying. And so the lies create a space in which you can let your life run off the rails, whether You never have to confront the fact that these are people you actually don't want to see.

1:20:48 That's not good? And, I mean, it's sort of a goodwill toward the future that you can develop. they're lying. Everyone recognizes that that's a problem, that we've all paid a huge price for the skepticism we now have about governments and corporations because whenever we catch them in a about a topic into essentially a calculation. It's got nothing to do with lying or honesty,

1:24:38 and he has this like very eloquent and, you know, very theatrical way of communicating. you call me back oh this thing came up and it's always they just they and they're always in a mess It's not worth it. 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.

1:27:11 an intervention there and say, why are you lying and why do you do this and have you with the first friend. There's some sort of a disconnect that you might not know about He's so smart, though. And that is a – so I don't – deception is part of the game and self-deception is part of the game. Edward. it's all going to be recorded. where everything's getting closer and closer and closer to the point where one day we're going to have this one database that we all draw from all the time.

1:31:59 in the way that we rely on DNA evidence. Joe Rogan Questions Everything. I believe it was in India because of fMRI that she had what they and I don't know that they've operationalized this in a way that will protect you from just After I did a study of belief, where I compared belief and disbelief and uncertainty with So she wanted to see whether we could see the difference between belief and disbelief and uncertainty at the micro level,

1:36:06 but if we could get it to the level of accuracy that we now rely on for DNA evidence, get there. And that, I think, would change things a lot. Because when you look at the price we pay And the most horrific, there was this one guy whose name is now escaping me, but there was a New Yorker profile on him where his house burned down and he was charged with

1:38:01 Think of the implications of negotiation among leaders of countries where you don't know whether people are telling the truth. That would be nice. We'd also have to find out what women think. really what they're trying to do is this, you know, read it out. Yeah. I mean, we just don't actually know what's true a liar. And I think people feel like there's the last and most critical loss of cognitive liberty.

1:42:23 hang in the balance, there are people And you say, I'm fine, but when the stakes are high Like, people were resisting books, you know, when books were first printed. Right. By the way, if you're driving around your car, everybody knows where you are. There's no hiding anymore. after it's too late. And I'm not sure how, I mean, just speaking personally, my own use of the internet and my use of the way in which my day gets segmented by the checking of email and

1:45:32 it's just a less satisfying. There's something about multitasking that is, I think, I was at a dinner the other day, for an hour. I didn't check my email like you know and not all that Obama's been lying about it like and right. It's fascinating when you find out that he oversaw a lot of these decisions to spy on people. Is she evil? If it was just all transparent, what kind of wars would we actually emotionally tolerate?

1:49:17 Protect people from the realities of the world that they're not necessarily aware of, a lot of people think there shouldn't be a CIA, there shouldn't be an NSA. There's something- way to find out so as to interdict that process, let's call that espionage. And that's going to be We just didn't. Can you get like a TSA pre-exemption? So you have to be willing to part with some kind of privacy.

1:52:37 Well, to some degree, that's true. oil wells. is that politics? We can call it politics, but that is religious sectarianism. Times sometimes. morning and become a bomb and kill 75 people, and it's got nothing to do with us. We call it politics. We're talking about, I supported our going into Afghanistan because we had to do it. was this slow bleed of attacks on us without any real reprisal for decades, since the early 80s.

1:57:37 I think we have to have a policy toward jihadists, which is a policy of hot war. Did you ever see – I'm sorry. There's a perception in the Muslim world, some of it is fraudulent and they don't really believe this. We shouldn't own it every time it happens. 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

2:02:15 I want to go back to what you said about the war being so expensive in the first place but clearly there are other explanations for that. and we dumped billions and billions of dollars in there. We paved a few roads, and now if you're an Afghani farmer, the United States military involved in the heroin production in Afghanistan. It's pretty transparent.

2:04:28 let's force all these people to destroy the most profitable crop they could grow because not the entire organization, but there's some factions that are profiting off of it. They That's hilarious. We're not talking about what's profitable or not profitable for the United States taxpayer. I'm not saying that people never conspire is you take someone like President Obama.

2:07:41 about Cheney and what do you think about Rumsfeld and all the stuff they did. War profiteers. He would have a, and all this came, I'm not just speculating, he said many of these things, Is he someone who was always that way and was just lying, but lying for some reason No, I don't think that's possible. What does that do to you? but there's no reason to doubt that he objected to the Iraq War,

2:11:07 and I think it's easy to convince a guy like Obama. Look what they do to each other. Well, when Colin Powell delivered that presentation at the UN, So it's, well, because of the ambience. So you don't open yourself up to the possibility of conspiracy? happened. We got attacked. We're going into Iraq. planning big plans? Yeah, but it's a big organization.

2:14:56 It's not, you know, half a million guys and tanks. Maybe I read it online. Someone said, do you believe in 9-11? Ask people if Is it really that high? or maybe they weren't even planes, anomaly, any event you could possibly describe, it's going to have a million what looked like coincidences in it, and which if you tried to engineer beforehand, like that. But if you're only looking for anomalies and you're not constrained by any overall thesis, you can find them in any situation. But just be honest about what this picture

2:18:54 actual real false flag events that the United States has engineered, war with Iraq under false pretenses. So we've got a no-fly zone over Iraq for years that we've been policing with I know some people do in a percentage. People call you up randomly in the middle of the day and ask you to answer a poll, most likely you're busy. Well, that number, the 46% of Americans believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, that's a real one.

2:21:14 And that has been stable. there's that real thing that people want to wrap something up tight with a bow. many people are very uncomfortable without cognitive closure. And it's a faulty intuition. So you mentioned – you asked me what I thought about the NSA thing. Very close to you? And Glenn Greenwald was the top of the list. just crazy enough to give him perfect credibility. I mean, he was like grateful for the 9-11 truth people,

2:26:13 All he wanted to do was to get in touch with Glenn Greenwald to show him all this- Even if you don't think this is what you were saying, this is what I think you were saying. I'm not talking about ideas. based on your interests the principles of honesty I fucking hate email. Whereas if you were sitting in front of that person talking to them and you said that,

2:29:07 They asked him about his approach to journalism. much to John Walker Lind or Adam Gadon or any white guy who woke up in Marin or Orange County I just fundamentally don't trust. genuinely want to know and a public service rendered think he let people know what was going on behind the scenes for quite a long time, and The government lied. I mean, want that information. Yeah, yeah. I don't want my daughter to grow up in a world where nukes are going off in our cities.

2:33:48 So the consequence of having a government that lies on issues like that- But it's an unfortunate fact in the world we live in. growing pot based on having sucked this data up, but we're looking for jihadists. That's an honest statement. So, like, what do you think is going on in the world? that it's, for the most part, they're people just like us in a vast bureaucracy trying

2:38:05 of the time. Well, no, there are... I mean, but we do this all... We kill Americans all the time. And I'm saying the consequence of finding out that one such event has occurred. in order to get us into a war where we kill other people and profit like crazy. It seems pretty cut And it's several over the course of several different administrations. 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.

2:41:43 Forget about 9-11. about whether you can trust anyone in a position of authority. I'm saying that the principle that is – well, one – there's two principles. petri dish examples of this, and then one example I use is to talk about what it's like that you're coming into a situation where the incentives are so perversely misaligned that even Now, you might not have a racist bone in your body,

2:45:17 good person, collaborate to do terrible things. And there are many ways in which... if there's no consequence to being rapaciously selfish, you're going to get people being where interests are aligned so that the penalties, the rewards for honesty are more obvious. No, no. In all fairness, I think there was an empty jet. I think they were going to have a drone jet. Okay. No, no. Just think of a prototypical situation where it seems

2:48:14 And what about Northwoods? I don't brings... I don't think the guy is a conspiracy theorist at all here, but I think he thinks But the point is that when you look at all the ways, certainly in a society where political power is not as concentrated as it is under That's why they accounted for one bullet doing all this damage to two different people.

2:51:19 lies somewhere in the middle. It's not an either or situation. But I don't think Lee Harvey Oswald And so when you look at what people do because they're afraid to get sued, just look at all of the stupid decisions people make in our society because they just want to hide the problem. And his only concern at that moment was not how the patient was doing.

2:53:48 So what? I think there's an either-or. Wow. you can get it do you have an so perfect Very enjoyable. Thank you. Always a pleasure. All right. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in to the podcast. We will be back next week. Sam Harris, thank you, brother.