AS256: Super AI and Terrorism, with Phil Torres

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 256, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, got a nice, long, action-packed episode for you today. As a result, not much time for me to do too much dilly-dallying here. I better get right over to that interview.

0:00:52 Thomas: Joining me back for a second time is Phil Torres. You'll remember him. He wrote The End. We had a nice, long, interesting discussion a few months back about that, and he's back now. His website is risksandreligion.org. He's written a couple, several, but we'll see what we can cover today. Articles, interesting articles on a few different topics that we're going to discuss. How are you doing, Phil?

0:01:17 Phil: Great, thanks so much for having me on.

0:01:19 Thomas: Thanks so much for coming on. So, there's a lot of stuff I want to get to. We'll see how it ends up. I don't know that we'll get to all of it. That's such is life. But you've written a few from a couple of different angles about terrorism. On one hand, idea that existential risks, which are your specialty, of course. And by the way, I have to say, the world hasn't ended since you came on. So I think you were wrong, right? Is that you're coming on to say I was wrong. The world didn't end. Right. Is that what this is?

0:01:48 Phil: No, I think because I was on, we managed to secure a few extra months.

0:01:53 Thomas: Oh. Crisis averted. Is that what you're saying?

0:01:56 Phil: Yeah, I would attribute our continued existence to that.

0:01:58 Thomas: Okay. So This isn't an apology tour, like, "Sorry, I thought the world was gonna end but I was wrong because I haven't seen any super volcanoes," and I kind of did want to see one because they're, they're kind of cool, but, oh.

0:02:12 Phil: Yeah, it would be pretty spectacular. Yeah, nothing yet. The Yellowstone National Park supervolcano remains dormant, but it's ready to go at any point. In fact, last I checked, the Caldra, which is the large magma chamber, ended up being twice as big, if I remember correctly, than what scientists had previously thought. So yeah, it's a mighty existential risk just waiting to

0:02:33 Thomas: That's A good That's a good place to maybe Start as a brief introduction. Is there anything, anything, anything since you came on that has kind of facts like that about the existential threats you described, any news or anything? One thing I can ask you about, it's okay if you don't know, I thought I read that the, some news about the fault line here in California and on the West Coast. Is that anything that you're familiar with? If not, it's okay.

0:02:40 Phil: Happen.

0:03:02 Phil: No, I'm not particularly familiar with it. I mean, without a doubt, the Great One, I think is what they call it, right, would be horrific for local individuals. But the risks that I tend to be focused on are ones that have really global and transgenerational consequences, not ones that would just devastate a localized region like California or San Francisco.

0:03:25 Thomas: Right. Well, look, it would probably interrupt my show quite a bit and I'll thank you to acknowledge the importance of it. I'm just teasing. You're right. Okay. So that would be really bad. It would be good for Lex Luthor and his, you know, beachfront property scam, but it's not going to do a whole lot for the whole world, I guess is what you're saying.

0:03:32 Phil: Yeah.

0:03:50 Phil: Yeah, there's a sense in which major but localized catastrophes – I mean, if you take a big picture view of our species across time, they're ultimately just little blips. And there have been, you know, many of them throughout history. Perhaps the most significant one was actually Supervolcano, which happened perhaps 77,000 years ago, called the Toba Catastrophe. And some geologists, Michael Rampino in particular, who's in the biology department, he's sort of a leading theorist who claims that this supervolcano caused a massive population bottleneck among Homo sapiens, resulting in something like maybe 500 breeding pairs.

0:04:36 Phil: I mean, you know, humanity very nearly went extinct many, many millennia ago. So that was probably the biggest incident we've encountered. But

0:04:45 Thomas: Right. So it's that level of risk that we're looking at. Yeah. I remember you saying that last time. That is so fascinating that the entire human population came down to what, a thousand or so people and it may be allegedly, allegedly. And, and that's all of, you know, this is before all of culture, our modern culture and our, you known what this is, before pre literature, pre all this stuff, nothing, nothing would have happened had things gone slightly worse. It's so fascinating to

0:04:46 Phil: Yeah, that's long before. Yeah. Yeah,

0:05:17 Thomas: Think about.

0:05:17 Phil: It is. Yeah, it was a very long time ago. I mean, back in the old Stone Age, long before the agricultural, the Neolithic revolution, which happened about 12,000 years ago. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of people don't. There's, I feel like there's a sense, you know, we look around at the world, there's a, the sense of robustness to our continued existence, but really, if you look at history, um, uh, again, if memory serves me correctly, the, the average, uh, mammalian species, uh, dies out after about, you know, 2.2 million years, um, and uh, yes, I mean, it's, it's, and of course you know, there were many other

0:05:35 Thomas: Wow.

0:05:50 Thomas: But how many of of them had the internet though. It's just us, right?

0:05:51 Phil: Uh, just us, yeah, there, there is a joke among some futurists that the dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program. So there's something kind of similar. Yeah, they have the internet, but I don't know, maybe the internet is a net positive in terms of risk. Sort of that's yet to be seen.

0:06:10 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, could be. Yeah, exactly. Well, that sort of transitions into, possibly transitions into terrorism a bit. I know the internet, that is certainly one of the risks of the internet is these ideas can be spread more easily, these harmful ideas. So while good ideas can being spread, who knows? I mean, it's, I guess we kind of have to be agnostic as to whether it's a net positive or negative. But let's talk about, there's some recent attacks that I, they're very recent, so we don't have all the details. By the time people are hearing this, they'll have far more detail.

So no need to go into the specific details of these recent attacks, but the bombing in Baghdad, in Bangladesh, the hostage situation, I think it ended, last number I heard, again, this could all change, but last number I heard was something like 20 dead in that, and then over 100 dead in Baghdad. So terrorism, you're the expert on this. We all think about, when we think about existential risks, and I think in general, when everyday people like me, or like not you, because you're an expert in this, but everyday me or any listener listening, or

0:06:24 Phil: Yeah, absolutely.

0:07:01 Phil: Same here.

0:07:21 Phil: Yeah.

0:07:22 Thomas: Just your average person who's maybe not even as informed about everyday risks that humanity might face, they might think of terrorism as a major threat to them. Like this is something, especially when you see it in the news, it's all these attacks, it seems like it's nonstop. But a recent article you wrote talked about how the fact like these giant risks that you've talked about are actually more likely to kill you than terrorism. Can you explain that a bit? Because I find that really, really mind-blowing. It's really interesting.

0:07:54 Phil: Yeah so I guess the first thing to point out is very very counterintuitive. Um, or, or perhaps another way to put it is, is our intuitions really do not track the actual dangers around us very well.

0:08:07 Thomas: Oh, that's for sure.

0:08:08 Phil: Yeah. So, so examples, there are plenty of examples to mention. So you're, you're, for example, your probability, your likelihood of dying in a terrorist act of some sort is about four times less than, uh, getting struck by lightning. So yeah, so that's, that's in fact, I believe that is a conservative estimate. It might actually be much better.

0:08:25 Thomas: Really? Now is that, let me just ask, is that for anyone in the world or for an American or for, you know, cause that'll obviously change if you live in Iraq or something. I mean, that that's going to change a little bit, right?

0:08:42 Phil: Yes. Excellent question. So that statistic is for Americans in particular, but no doubt. You know, if you were to look at the global population, I would bet the probability is pretty similar. Again, I mean, if you're living in Afghanistan or Iraq or some of these hot spots of uh of terrorism these days, yeah, you're the probability is higher, but it's still not as high as you might think. And so another uh another datum which is relevant here is when you compare lightning strikes to death by uh meteorite impact, it turns out you're you're much more likely to die in a meteor uh an impact of with a meteorite than to to die in a lightning strike.

0:09:28 Phil: So it's very counterintuitive. In the article I wrote, which is for the Future of Life Institute, I have plenty of citations because it is quite hard to wrap your head around. But actually there's a really nice BBC article that goes into great detail about how exactly scientists calculate these odds. Odds. Oftentimes if you list the worries that people have biggest concern to least concern, more or less you can invert that list to what's actually most likely to kill you in your life. So I mean exactly one of these lines, part of the article that I wrote for the Future of Life Institute, also basically just looks at some of the figures that have been proposed by various leading existential risk scholars. So these are individuals who study the worst case scenarios for humanity, instances in which either we get permanently catapulted back into the Stone Age or there's some extinction event.

0:10:24 Phil: So either way, it's something that forever irreversibly closes off some sort of hopeful future. I mean, a lot of the existential risk scholars would talk about it in terms of post-humanity, that there are superior modes of being that humans have yet to, or organisms, life, earth-originating organisms have yet to explore, and existential risk is something that would prevent us from doing that. So some of these individuals put forward statistics like Sir Martin Rees, who's at Cambridge University and co-founded the Center for the Study of Existential Risk. He argues in a really fantastic book called Our Final Hour, which was published in 2005, I believe. He argues that we basically have a 50-50 chance of civilization has a 50 50 chance of making it through the current century.

0:11:14 Phil: And Nick Bostrom, who's a pretty well-known philosopher at Oxford University, and he co-founded the Future of Humanity Institute. He argues in a paper from 2002 that we have a 25% chance of encountering an existential risk within the next 100 years. So when you actually – if you take these numbers seriously – and again, I mean these are – there is without a doubt some subjective evaluation that goes into these. So they could be wrong. All of these scholars are absolutely explicit about that. A lot of the risks have to do with future anticipated technologies. It's really hard to quantify that. There are nonetheless some risks like asteroid impacts and super volcanic eruptions. You can look at history and actually quantify and then make very robust probability estimates for the future, but these are very educated conjectures by these individuals.

0:12:01 Phil: If you examine the numbers and compare them to statistics, for example, like dying in a car crash, it turns out you are at least 25 or 50 times more likely to encounter an an existential risk scenario in your lifetime, then you are to die in a car accident. Again, if you take these figures seriously. And I would argue there's actually very good reason for taking them seriously. Even, you know, there was, I'm forgetting the year exactly, but the Stern Review for the Economics of Climate Change. It was a UK government funded study, which was hugely influential. And it was run by Sir Nicholas Stern. And it stipulated a 0.01 probability of extinction per year.

0:12:51 Phil: So that adds up over the course of a century to be 9.5, which is, again, it's much, much more, much higher than your probability of dying in a car crash. And there was even a really, really fascinating, I would highly recommend reading this, very fascinating report just released by the Global Challenges Foundation, which has connections with Oxford and I think is based in Sweden, if I remember correctly. And as they put it, you're at least five times more likely to die in an existential catastrophe than to die In a car crash.

0:13:25 Thomas: It is so interesting because it just seems like in intuitively, it feels like that can't be right. You know, because car crashes happen every day. We all, we probably all know somebody who's been in a car accident. Maybe, uh, maybe we know someone who's died in a car accident. But I guess the best way I can figure in my mind is that though those things happen every day in the world, the thing about the existential risk is it affects everyone. I mean, it affects everyone on the planet by definition, right?

0:13:56 Phil: Exactly.

0:13:56 Thomas: So if there's any chance of that, that's going to be, that affects everybody. So that kind of increases the probability, or rather it makes it look a little different because even though you're seeing these little car accidents every day. They're just affecting one to two to however many people out of, you know, the entire population of the planet on a given day.

0:13:57 Phil: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, you're exactly right about that. I mean, the concept of risk is generally defined as the scope of the consequences of some event multiplied by its probability. So you can have a very significant risk that's improbable if its consequences are huge. So yeah, without a doubt, I mean the case of the meteorite, actually there isn't much subjective judgment that's gone into to that figure.

0:14:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:46 Phil: Um, yeah, part of it is based on, you know, if there was a sizable meteorite that struck Earth, I mean, you could have, you know, thousands, millions, uh, potentially even more than that, humans affected by that. So that would, you know, over a certain period of time, that would actually increase the significance of that, that risk.

0:15:03 Thomas: Yeah. If Bruce Willis isn't available to fly into space and figure that all out for us, that could certainly be dangerous. Yeah, OK.

0:15:08 Phil: Right. Yeah. Well, well, there is, you know, there are a lot of downsides to future technologies. So this would be like, you know, biotechnology, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and AI. There's a lot of risks, profound risks.

0:15:25 Thomas: I was going to I was actually going to ask that because that's something that Sam Harris has been talking a lot about recently. And as a result, I'm guessing a lot of the listeners will be familiar. He's been talking about the risk for AI and that you could conceive of once there's an intelligence that's going to be vastly superior to ours and then become sort of conscious and then has the ability to reproduce or to evolve at a faster rate because it's a machine. It's not bound by biology and all that.

0:15:26 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:15:57 Thomas: It doesn't take take much to imagine that going wrong. What are your thoughts on that? Because I've, I've there are definitely smart people in both camps. You know, there's smart people who think that it won't happen. It's overblown, not a big deal. And then there's, you know, they're Sam Harris, and there's other really smart people think now this is something we really need to be worried about. What's your take on that.

0:15:58 Phil: Yeah.

0:16:16 Phil: I think caution is very prudent. I find the arguments for taking AI or superintelligence seriously to be very, very, very cogent. Um, I should also add, by the way, you mentioned consciousness a moment ago, uh, you know, one of the counter arguments sometimes that's been leveled against, uh, individuals who are concerned about super intelligence is that machines, you Know, computers, uh can't be conscious.

0:16:42 Thomas: Oh, yeah, that's a really interesting thing to talk about.

0:16:43 Phil: Uh, yeah. So, so, you, know, um, John Searle has a famous, argument the Chinese Room Thought Experiment. And that purports to show that computers, no matter how intelligent they may behave, they will always lack understanding. There's a distinction between syntax and semantics, and they're syntactic machines, machines whereas we have this kind of semantic, uh, you know, meaning that we, we, uh, it's a currency in which our, our mind, uh, deals. Um, I myself am not convinced by it, but ultimately my point is that is, is not, it's immaterial to the issue, um, of, of super intelligence. It, you know, a super intelligent machine does not need to be conscious to pose a massive problem. The notion of intelligence is defined in the cognitive sciences as just the capacity to use available to achieve some end that it might have.

0:16:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:17:46 Thomas: You're right. So I did misspeak when I said, you know, that isn't a dependent part of the problem here. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, the bottom line is the computer understands Chinese one way or the other. I means, whether or not it's conscious or, you Know, so either way, it'll have whatever effect that it's going to have. So that makes sense.

0:18:05 Phil: Yeah, the effect I think is the key part. I should say it's easy to misspeak about this stuff because colloquially we do tend to confuse Confuse all these terms. Confuse is even the wrong sense. I mean, they're just very elastic terms that are polysemous and we apply all over the place in different contexts. So there is a sense in which intelligence is equivalent with consciousness. But in this more technical context, that's not what intelligence means.

0:18:32 Phil: I means it's just means-ends reasoning. Reasoning. So you could have an AI machine that is, there is absolutely no inner life. There's no, it's not awake in a sense, but what it does is it pursues the ends that it's been programmed to pursue. And it is generally clever enough to solve certain problems that it encounters in the course of trying to achieve its ends. So yeah, I mean, this sense of superintelligence could be catastrophic. Again, I find the arguments very compelling.

0:18:32 Thomas: But there is an ingredient of a sort of malice, right? And maybe you don't have to be conscious for that or the computer doesn't have to be cautious, but it has to, I think part of the argument is that it does essentially need to you have goals that aren't ours, right?

0:19:06 Phil: Yeah. Yes.

0:19:22 Phil: I think the way you put it just now is perfect. Because just a moment ago, you said malice. So one of the things that a lot of theorists who work on these issues, and who take superintelligence seriously as a threat to our long-term survival, they emphasize that, you don't need, oftentimes people talk about unfriendly AI, but the term unfriendley means, can refer to both malicious AIs. In fact, there was a really good paper published just recently by Roman, I'm forgetting his last name. He's at Louisville. But he's a really fantastic scientist. He published this extraordinary paper in which he discusses the possibility of individuals intentionally designing malevolent AIs in order to induce some sort of catastrophic But on the other hand, the issue is that if the AI's values or if its goals simply fail to align with ours a little bit, perhaps in a way that prima facie looks utterly benign, it could still be absolutely catastrophic.

0:20:27 Phil: So for example, so part of this idea is predicated on the notion, this idea called the orthogonality thesis, and it was articulated by Nick Bostrom, but it really follows directly from the definition mission of, of intelligence, if intelligence is ability to acquire the means necessary to, uh, achieve its ends, whatever those ends are, then it, it follows directly that, any level of intelligence could be combined with any level of ends. So, I mean, you could have a super intelligence that cares about, um, you know, cares about making paperclips is a, is a now famous example of literature. There's nothing. So you could have this AI that wants to achieve ends that seem utterly foreign, weird, strange, ridiculous from our human perspective.

0:20:20 Thomas: Yeah, right, right.

0:21:14 Phil: This certainly ties into this notion that you should not anthropomorphize or anthropopathize the AI. You shouldn't project human qualities onto the AI, it could genuinely, if it has a different cognitive architecture, pursue goals that, again, are absolutely bizarre from our perspective. So ultimately, you could think of like, you know, again, the famous example of the paperclip maximizer. It's a super intelligent mind that is programmed to produce the maximum number of paperclips. This may strike listeners as kind of ridiculous, kind of silly, and also sort of benign. It's not immediately apparent how a paperclip maximizer would pose an existential threat to the human species.

0:22:04 Phil: So this is where another concept that's generally referred to as instrumental convergence, this is where this enters the picture. Pretty much no matter what the AI's ends are, you can sort of predict its behavior at least a little bit, because in order to achieve those ends, it's probably going to need things like a source of energy. It's probably gonna need, you know, perhaps some material, a chemical from the Earth, a source of atoms and molecules and so on. So you could sort of predict that a paperclip maximizer is going to want to as much raw material as possible in order to make the highest number of paperclips possible.

0:22:43 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:44 Phil: So you wrap your head around that, it starts to become a bit clear why exactly this could be existentially disastrous, disastrous. As one of the famous theorists in the field, Yudkowsky, has put it, the AI doesn't need to hate you or love you or anything like that, but you happen to be made out of atoms that it could use for something else. So in the case of the paperclip maximizer, there's this species out there called Homo sapiens, we um, contain a lot of, know, atomic particles and It's

0:23:18 Thomas: What you're saying is at some point there's going to be a, these paperclips are made out of humans. Soylent paperclps. Yeah, yeah,

0:23:20 Phil: Exactly. Yes. Yeah, at some point Um, yeah, I mean it's, it's entirely plausible that it might, and also, I mean, even beyond that, you know, it might see it being a super intelligent, uh uh, uh, creature, it might realize immediately that really the best, you humans are going to want to stop it, you, because they, you know, smart humans realize that it could pose a risk. So the best thing for it to do before it can get started on its endeavor to, to, you know, manufacture as many paperclips as possible is to exterminate humanity.

0:23:58 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah and also another example that occurs to me, let me know if this makes sense to you, is how many, you know, species have we driven to extinction, not because we had some quest to drive them to extinction or to the brink of extinction, but simply because we didn't notice them. You know, I mean, we just were, as humans, we were caring about our business. I could imagine if AI gets to the point where it's like that, where it has its own goals, whatever they may be, and there's, oh, there's some humans, oh I stepped on one, oh it doesn't matter, you It could be anything. It could be they ruin the environment for us, you know, like we have done in some places for other species just because they want different things out of the environment.

0:24:00 Phil: Yeah. Yeah.

0:24:43 Phil: I think you're absolutely right. I mean, it's crucial to recognize that if we really did create a genuinely super intelligent machine, it would be extraordinarily powerful. In fact, if it had a qualitatively different mind, it could potentially able to understand features of the universe, features of reality that lie outside of our cognitive space. Every organism out there has this gland behind its eyes, which has evolved for certain purposes. And part of that evolution was sort of carving out these concept-generating mechanisms. Concepts are what we use to represent reality in our minds, the concept of an atom, the concept of stock market or whatever. So the point is that these mechanisms, they all contain intrinsic limitations. Communications. Our pets, dogs and cats, no matter how hard you try to explain the notion of an atom or a boson or something like that, they're just not going to get it. They simply lack the cognitive resources to do that.

0:25:09 Thomas: Yeah, I try to explain things to my cats all the time and they never they simply look at me with disbelief.

0:26:05 Phil: There's no reason to think humans aren't in the same. So by analogy, you could imagine a qualitatively different kind of artificial intelligence that perhaps is able to cognize aspects of the universe that not only can we not understand, but we can't even, I mean, there's a second order ignorance. We're not even aware that we're ignorant of them, just like the dog is not even aware that it's ignorant of physics or certain asteroids that orbit our area or something.

So Yeah, you could imagine, even beyond what you were saying, you can imagine a superintelligence manipulating and rearranging the world in ways that are as utterly inexplicable and and magical as the things that we have done to the earth are to, you know, a chipmunk, you know, just, it's just can't even begin to understand how we build skyscrapers and airplanes and whatnot. So you can, so, I mean, these sort of issues, I may, I mentioned the orthogonality thesis earlier, the conversion instrumental convergence phenomenon, you know, and then this sort of the potential for a qualitatively different kind of mind. I mean all of these hints at, I think quite strongly, at why we should take this this phenomenon uh futuristic, you know, speculative phenomenon very

0:26:28 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:27:27 Phil: Seriously. And I agree with those who who believe that it's perhaps the greatest known uh long-term risk to our survival.

0:27:35 Thomas: Well, It's interesting to think that we could create a being that's so much more an intelligence or whatever you want to call it, AI, that's just perceptive or more able to fathom things that we can't and all that kind of stuff. It is interesting to me to think about that and how relative to Sam Harris's kind of of moral landscape that he's talked about and to a lot of people who listen to the show subscribe to. Because he was forced to admit one time, a consequence of his morality is that if there were some being that's vastly superior to us in the way that we are to ants, they would be more important morally and would be able to essentially squish us like we squish ants and not really think twice about it. So it's funny to think that we could have a hand in whether or not that being comes to exist.

0:27:35 Phil: Uh,

0:28:23 Thomas: It's like, oh, let's not let that exist, even though it would be better. They would be better in some ways than we would, but it's like now we see, but we like us, so we want to be around.

0:28:34 Phil: It's it's really interesting. I mean you could even perhaps uh formulate an argument for why we ought to as soon as possible, within certain bounds of reason, create some kind of superintelligence or perhaps create massive simulations with sentient organisms, with minds that are analogous to ours, order to maximize the total amount of pleasure in the universe.

0:29:02 Thomas: That's a separate debate, but it is interesting. Well, I wanted to direct it back because because I want to ask you, so now more practically, at least in terms of what we're seeing every day and how people like me and the listeners are greeting this news and changing our perceptions of things like terrorism and this, because your article, I think it's very fascinating. And like we talked about, these existential threats are statistically, according to these estimates, which in some cases, as you said, are a little subjective or a little flawed, but might not be for other things.

0:29:05 Phil: Yeah. Yeah.

0:29:37 Phil: They remain, yeah. They may remain controvertible. Yes.

0:29:41 Thomas: Sure, sure. But Even still, it's pretty compelling that these are more likely to kill us than not just terrorism, which is interesting, but even car accidents, because what should we do with this information? I mean, how do you think, and again, I do want to bring it back to the terrorism question. So how do you think we and the world and governments and and all this should be reacting to these attacks that we're seeing in the news all the time. What should we be doing?

0:29:42 Phil: Yeah, yeah.

0:30:08 Phil: Well, I think important to note that there is a connection between terrorism and existential risk. I don't believe there's one right now. I do think if, for example, For example, the Islamic State, which in their propaganda magazine called Dabiq, which is named after the small Syrian town in which they believe Armageddon will soon commence. In one of the issues, they explicitly fantasize about acquiring a nuclear weapon from Pakistan, which has a history of nuclear malfeasance, and then sneaking it through the porous borders of shipping it across to South America, shipping through the porous borders all the way up into the U.S. And I think if they were to succeed in that, it would be globally catastrophic. I mean, it would affect the global economy, travel. I mean the repercussions I think would be quite profound, but they wouldn't be existential.

0:30:15 Thomas: Right. Hmm. Right.

0:31:11 Phil: I mean I think civilization could certainly recover from that. I should also add, by the way, I mean, a lot of the top nuclear terrorism experts assign extraordinarily high probabilities to a nuclear attack. And so, you know, so Graham Allison, for example, at Harvard University, has claimed that there's about 50 percent chance that within 10 years, a nuclear bomb will go off in a major urban center in the U.S. So, yeah, I mean – and he's really not anomalous. In fact, he's also highly respected and quite a venerable individual. So anyways, yeah, I don't, I think it's really crucial for people, first of all, to recognize that right now, uh, you are much more likely to get, you know, to die in a meteorite strike than to, to Die in a terrorist act.

0:31:34 Thomas: Jeez.

0:32:01 Thomas: But is the difference that this seems to be, here's why I think, and I'm not, I don't think I'm telling you anything you don't know, but here's, it seems to me that this is a different to me because in one case, we're looking at a meteor. I can't talk to a meteor, I can adjust what a meteor is going to do. To do with words. These terrorist attacks seem to be, people want to make patterns out of them. They want to say, oh, it's Islam. We got to stop that. Or they want to Say, no, it is actually our intervention. Whatever it is, they are trying to form a storyline and it feels like something that could be preventable. Because you can't prevent some of these catastrophic events you are talking about. Some of them are pretty much, we can't do anything about it.

0:32:02 Phil: Uh, it's yeah. Yeah.

0:32:50 Phil: Asteroids. We probably can at this point, super volcanoes. We, uh.

0:32:51 Thomas: Mm-hmm. But there could be a kind that we couldn't, right? There could be a type of one of these events that we couldn't do anything about.

0:33:01 Phil: There are some events. Yeah. That are, are very difficult to, uh, I mean like super volcanoes, for example. Not even in science fiction literature have clever people come up with a good way of mitigating the effects or even obviating the situation to begin with.

0:33:16 Thomas: Yeah, so this, I think the reason we focus more on these things, and it all goes hand-in-hand with the reason why we focus on these shootings, whereas, you know, car accidents kill far more people or whatever it may be. There's a difference between, oh, someone is using like their intentionality and killing someone else, you know, it feels like we should be able to stop that. You know, is that, what do you think about that?

0:33:16 Phil: Yeah, feels like we should be able to intervene and prevent this. Yeah, I don't know. I guess there's perhaps there's some moral dimension to it that catastrophes from nature don't have and that there is some agential kind of aspect to it, an individual making a choice, a moral decision to hurt other people. So yeah, I do think it carries – it's a bit more – there's more of like an emotional valence to it in a particular sense. I if mean, ultimately the goal is to be a rational person and to, to proportion your fears to the best available evidence considered in its totality. Um, so yeah, yeah, right.

0:33:49 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, mm-hmm.

0:34:24 Thomas: Well, or, hold on, let me say this. I mean, if we're in the business of proportioning our fears, which is arguable whether or not we can really do that, but would it be to focus on things where our fear could make any difference? Whereas to be afraid of something where we can have no effect on it, no matter what we do virtually, uh, you know, a lightning strike, we can't, we're not, for the most part, I mean, there's some things you can do obviously to prevent the obvious, the obvious. I'm not going to walk outside with an umbrella, you know, or whatever, and during a lightning storm, but there are things where it's like, well, if that happens to me, it happens to me. If it turns out I have some incredibly horrible disease, I get diagnosed with it tomorrow. I, I got a brain tumor, you know, there are things that shit happens, what can I do?

0:34:33 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right? Yeah.

0:35:08 Thomas: Even if those may be, if you run the numbers for what we're talking about, even if those are a bigger risk, doesn't it still, couldn't it still be rational to not focus on them? Focus on things where it's like, well, if we had a different policy for, I don't know, our foreign policy, if we adjusted our gun control, if we did something, we'd be able to prevent these deaths.

0:35:12 Phil: Yeah, yeah.

0:35:30 Phil: Yeah, I, I, uh, I actually very much agree with you, but I, but I also would say that a lot of these risks, there are various things that we can do and, um, I do, I mean, there is a sense in which, a way in which, fear can become utterly pointless because again, this, you know, our capacity to to actually do something about the risks is limited. So I think that's a waste of mental energy, but you know, like you mentioned lightning strikes, I mean, you can still, you stay out of the, you know, don't, don't perform an experiment with the key you know, attached to the end of a kite or something, yeah.

0:36:00 Thomas: Yeah, someone already did that one anyway. So, hmm.

0:36:03 Phil: Yeah, even I, you know, there isn't a single existential risk, perhaps with the exception of super eruptions, that can't be significantly mitigated. Climate change, we know exactly what to do. Biodiversity loss, which is a profound issue that almost nobody's talking about. The biosphere is wilting. We're in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event and so on. I mean, a lot of these things we can do. I certainly also think terrorism, there are things that I think US foreign policy has had a significant effect on terrorism overseas. I do not think that puts Islam off the hook. In fact, I think the religion is a major factor in the causal equation of terrorist activities. Um, but I mean, the, the ideology is like a lens through which, uh, these individuals interpret world affairs and it just so happens that, you know, the world superpower, which a 2014 global poll found that citizens of the earth overwhelmingly see the U.S. as the number one threat to world peace, far more than North Korea, Iran, or any other state.

0:36:16 Thomas: Oh, right. Yeah, I think we might have talked about that last time.

0:37:17 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, so you have this huge juggernaut go in and, you know, and decimate huge areas and essentially create a situation that looks on the surface or when you're in the midst of it, it looks as if the world is ending. And really, if you read the, you know, I would encourage people to read the scholarly literature. There's actually some really good books out there that are quite accessible as well. There's Will McCants is one, Jessica Stern, Mark Juergensmeyer, Francis Flannery. I mean, there are a whole bunch. They all point out that there is a duality of factors. You have the religious ideologies on one hand, and you have U.S. foreign policy and Western intervention on the other.

0:38:04 Phil: And in fact, some new atheists like Sam Harris like to say, you know, the regressive left doesn't listen to what the terrorists are saying. But I'm not so sure that – I think he's right in a limited sense for sure. But I don't think he takes his advice as far as he should. If you actually listen to what the terrorists say, they also mention all sorts of Western interventionist phenomena.

0:38:33 Phil: The Sykes-Picot Agreement is a major complaint of the Islamic State. State. Bin Laden had very specific political material complaints that led him to declare war against the U.S. in the mid-90s and then obviously follow through with it in 2001. So I mean it really is US foreign – scholar that I'm aware of would say that US foreign policy is not a major reason why you have the Islamic State and all of these – this this proliferation of even Shiite militias that now control parts of Iraq and are answerable to Tehran. In fact, a lot of US officials, David Petraeus is one, have singled out these apocalyptic militias as being the most significant long-term threat to stability in the region, much more than the Islamic State, which is going to die out here pretty soon.

0:39:30 Phil: Um, so, but I also think it's important, so I think having mentioned the the the present day insignificance of terrorism, I think it's also really important to look into the future and see how terrorism could at some point decades down the line pose an existential threat. And this is part of my paper I just published in Skeptic magazine. And it basically, I provide a number of arguments that are actually drawing from the scholarly literature to claim that we have actually quite good reason for expecting the size and the frequency of apocalyptic movements to non-trivially increase in the future. So things like climate change, biodiversity loss, these are conflict multipliers or threat multipliers that will result in all sorts of destabilizing effects like megatrouts and extreme weather, social upheaval, economic uncertainty, and so on. In fact, there was a paper published just last year that connected or strongly suggests a direct causal link between anthropogenic climate change and the rise of the Islamic State.

0:40:42 Thomas: Well, okay. Yeah. That's interesting because some people who, you know, some people who my listeners will be familiar with, people who are kind of on the Rubin end of things and on the anti-regressive left end of things, went kind of nuts over that claim. And they give Bill Nye a bunch of shit because he said that he thought, you you know, that climate change was, was partially or could be partially responsible for, you know, ISIS and all that. So it's interesting that, sounds like there's at least some basis for that. There's, it sounds Like it's a strong possibility from what you're saying.

0:40:59 Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I would encourage people to think about this. Imagine two worlds, one in which there is environmental isn't a lot of conflict as a result of the massive loss of around the world. That so imagine, imagine that situation. Keter's paragraphs, everything else is the same, you have all the same two political tensions and state and non-state actors that are vying for for uh power and so on. And then imagine another world in which you have environmental devastation and you have, uh you know, the the ruination of whole ecosystems, ecosystems, which again, some very prominent papers in journals like Nature and Science have recently talked about a global scale state shift in terms of the biosphere, which could result in a period of like a decade or so. I mean, it could radically transform the global ecosystem.

0:42:15 Phil: Everything would collapse, it would be irreversible. So I mean you could imagine that world, like which of these two worlds do you think is going to have a worse uh terrorism issue? I mean, it's it's obviously going to be the one where people are are pushed to the brink of survival and, um, I mean, there are plenty of cases of, you know, historically speaking, it's in times of great societal stress as a result of wars or as a result of natural disasters, when you oftentimes have extreme apocalyptic movements that emerge that use violence as a means for achieving their survival ends, oftentimes it's in this context that you have demagogues emerge.

In a sense, it's exactly the case in the U.S. We had the Great Recession, and a lot of middle-class white people suffered and they're now supporting Donald Trump, you know, who's this kind of messianic figure who promises, you know, great changes and, you know, to kick all the 11 million immigrants out and build a huge wall and so on. Um, so I mean, he's, a he's, you know, there's something analogous going on right here in the in the U.S. Um, yeah, if you look overseas, you know, it's without a doubt the wars caused by the West in combination with environmental degradation, these are creating – I mean these are the fertilizer of apocalyptic fanaticism. I mean historically it's the case. I'm not saying any – if there are terrorism scholars listening, they're not going to push back against any of these claims. It's only typically people who aren't familiar with the relevant literature, literature, there's robust evidence for a lot of these claims.

0:42:23 Thomas: Sure. Yeah.

0:44:03 Thomas: Well, yeah, sure. I think the the, the phrase you used, I think that made a lot of sense was conflict multiplier. You know, I mean, sure, it's not like climate change is pulling the trigger or something or or climate change is exploding a suicide vest. But I think it makes sense to me that it's not helping. It could be making things worse.

0:44:27 Phil: I think also there's a big problem. People are really attracted to simple explanations, and simple explanations are preferable when you have two competing hypotheses that equally explain the same phenomenon. But that's not the case here. You have regressive leftists on one side who almost entirely point to US foreign policy see blunders, and then you have the more neocon individuals on the other side who like to, and both of these camps are, are, they have simplistic views of the the causal uh foundation of terrorism, um, it's much too reductive, the the world really is very complicated, and climate change, you're right, it's not pulling a trigger and not directly causing someone to uh know to go out and and fight, you know, shout "Allahu Akbar" before blowing themselves up. But it is without a doubt a driving background force that's pushing individuals.

0:44:33 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:45:26 Phil: I mean, you have to ask the question also, like, you're maybe the proximate cause of somebody blowing themselves off in a crowded marketplace, is their belief that they're about to go to heaven forever. That I don't think that that can be ignored. But also, you have to ask the question, how did they become radicalized in the first place? What were the conditions that led them to? And oftentimes, you know, situations, again, you're living in an area that gets bombed by the US, and it looks like a dystopic, post-apocalyptic landscape, you might be inclined to actually believe that the world is is ending. There's a really great interview with an Islamic Fighter from, I think, 2014. It was a Vice, it was one

0:45:37 Thomas: Right. Oh, I

0:46:17 Phil: Of those, it

0:46:17 Thomas: Might have seen that. Yeah, that was a really interesting series. I did.

0:46:20 Phil: Was really, really good. And he interviews this one grown man who says to the camera, we will, it's something very close to this, we'll destroy your buildings just like you destroyed our buildings. We will kill your women just like you killed our women. And then he says, and we will kill your, and he, he starts to choke up and then he's, he kind of gets out. He kind of, you know, proceeds just a little bit, like we'll kill your children. And he starts to cry. And then he says just like you killed our children. So, I mean, there's a sense in which you morally sensitive people can, can sort of understand that this, this is a guy who, who, I I mean, from the looks of it, at least, probably endured some kind of personal tragedy.

0:47:06 Phil: Has that contributed to his extremist, you know, now sort of affiliation? Yeah, probably. Yeah, so I think, you Know, like so many intellectual debates, there's a view somewhere in the middle that combines the two, you know, extremes.

0:47:25 Thomas: That's where I constantly find myself. That's my show. I'm in the middle. Middle. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I think there, and, and one thing that's interesting about being in the middle is, is maybe I don't, I don't know that I, I don't have the answers or anything, but I, what I try to do as best I can is at least try to see where bias is affecting other people's answers, you know?

0:47:28 Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:47:51 Thomas: And, and it's easy to do when you don't try to solve anything. I don't solve anything. I just sit here and critique. No, but it is true. There are people who will paint a straw man of like, oh, the suicide bombers, they're either nuts or they're poor and don't have anything. That's actually not true. And that's what's so interesting about it.

0:48:11 Thomas: In fact, I just saw an article on this recent attack that think all of the attackers, I think it was the Bangladesh one. And these happened so close together that I could have have easily misconstrued them, but that they were all highly educated, well-off people, actually.

0:48:09 Phil: It's not true. Yeah,

0:48:27 Thomas: And that happens so often. And so there's definitely, you can't dismiss the ideology. Now, I think you could still claim, like you talked about there, that that could either be explained by, oh, it's just the religion and that's how it affects these people that aren't poor and that, you know, they're otherwise healthy. Or the, I guess, hatred induced by foreign policy blunders or whatever it is could also have that effect. So it's hard to see either way. But one thing that I think is clear is that it's not a result. It's not like there's a difference between a mental illness kind of attack, which is a little bit simplistic to even say, but there is a difference between that and a calculated suicide mission.

0:48:27 Phil: There Is this notion that some terror scholars have had, and it has since been debunked, but it's this notion of psychologic. And it was supposed to describe these sort of, you crazy uh views, the it was an idea that referred to the mental illness of terrorists as an explanatory uh phenomenon with respect to, you know, the various the various acts, like how is it that somebody who is saying, how could they, you know, burn the Jordanian pilots?

0:49:39 Thomas: Right. And there are people who define it definitely just say, well, if he did this, if he did this attack, he's that by definition insane, which I've seen happen in these sort of apologist thing, yeah.

0:49:39 Phil: Yeah.

0:49:49 Phil: And I I think that's wrong. And and again, I mean, that that notion has been. And

0:49:53 Thomas: It's a No True Scotsman fallacy, I think sort of I mean, well, if you, if he weren't insane, he wouldn't have done that, you know, that sort of thing. Hmm.

0:49:56 Phil: Yeah, right. Yeah, there is also something problematic with that from a more logical perspective. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of amazing that terrorism really is sort of a hobby of the middle or even upper class. I mean, there are a fair number of, you know, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who's the current caliph of the Islamic State, has a PhD in Islamic studies from a very respectable institution. You know, Ayman al-Zawahiri right now is the head of al-Qaeda, and he's an eye surgeon. I mean a lot of them are quite well educated, but I also – it's important to point out that you don't have to be poor to have grievances. Instances.

I'm not in a bad situation in my life, but if, say, Iran preemptively invaded the US, I could very well be convinced to, I don't know, maybe engage in some kind of violent acts against what I would see as a kind of crusader of some sort. So yeah, I do think it's really, really important for people to recognize the reciprocal interaction between material conditions, societal conditions, and so on, and ideology. The ideology is a lens through which to view, you know, to interpret, to give meaning to, you know political, social, and events that happen in the world. If you have a different ideology, you maybe interpret them in a much less violent Or a much more violent way. But also, if those events are different, then you

0:50:35 Thomas: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

0:51:38 Phil: Might not end up with the same views or the same, you know, propensities. So yeah, it's crucial for people to, I get frustrated very often listening to the conversation when it's just like, you the root causes of terrorism, because sometimes he'll just say, you know, it's so masochistic to masochist against his term to blame the Islamic state and so on, on the U.S. but I just strongly disagree. And I think the scholarly literature is on my side, not on his side.

0:52:21 Thomas: Well, I think there's a, a there is, and it's so hard because it, like you said, the world is complex. It branches off into a million different incidents, you know, who did this part here and who did what where, but there is, there could also be a difference between a causal factor and an actual moral failing. You know, I mean, it could be like the example I've brought up a bunch of times talking about something completely different, is climate change scientists did cause climate climate skeptics. I mean, but it doesn't mean they did anything wrong necessarily. I mean, it could be, you could also say, and again, I'm not trying to whitewash all of American foreign policy. I'm just saying you could parse it out and say, well, yes, it might have been a result of this, but we also had no other choice but to do this, or maybe we made the right decision when we did this, you know. So just to say, I mean you could could also take that approach and look at specific instances.

But if I were to try to put your feet to the fire and say, what do you actually recommend? You know, how do we, granted, if we take it for granted that all these, that American foreign policy is a big factor and all that, what Do we do at this point, as regards, you know, Iraq and ISIS and the violence we're seeing today? Should the US just, are you a, I don't know if I want to say pacifist, but at least a non-interventionist or something?

0:52:54 Phil: Yeah.

0:53:43 Phil: No,

0:53:44 Thomas: Should we just be out of there or what do you think?

0:53:44 Phil: No, No, I'm not a pacifist, I take conflict very seriously. I mean, much more seriously than I would say, you the U.S. has historically. I take it very seriously, you know, there has to be a really good argument to justify conflict. We didn't have that with Iraq. I mean, pretty much all of my recommendations for the current situation are retroactive. It's all about stuff that we should not have done. Because right now, the quagmire is so convoluted and so apparently, I mean seemingly insoluble that one thing I could say that doesn't work. Oftentimes, there are these sort of two different approaches. One is to kill the terrorists. The other is to focus on their ideology. I don't think killing terrorists, it's also called the whack-a-mole strategy, that is just not going to help. In fact, oftentimes killing them, which is, you know, even Sam Harris has mentioned on a few occasions, there's an interview he had with Graham Wood where he suggested, why don't we just meet, you know, the Islamic State on the fields of Dabiq or surrounding

0:54:14 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Oh, right. Which is

0:54:57 Phil: Dabi-

0:54:57 Thomas: Their prophecy or whatever, right? That they, yeah.

0:54:57 Phil: Yeah, and we'll just prove them wrong. We'll just show them that this isn't Armageddon, we'll decimate their forces, you know, one third of their army isn't going to go on to supernaturally defeat Constantinople, as they believe, after which Jesus will ascend over Damascus. So I mean, it's that, and Graham Wood, of course, you Know, having like studied this issue, says no, that would be a terrible idea, because the ideology is going to survive that incident. In fact, the ideology might even more for mutate into something much more dangerous after all. I mean, you know, there was, um, I did an interview with, with Will McCants. He's a, uh, apocalyptic scholar of apocalypticism at the Brookings Institute and a immensely educated, informed guy. Guy, and he affirmed what I already knew, really, which is that apocalypticism, which is, the reason I keep mentioning that is that's sort of one of the most dangerous ideologies out there. I mean, it's an ideology that can justify just virtually any act of violence or barbarism no matter how catastrophic.

0:55:11 Thomas: So,

0:56:04 Phil: So apocalypticism, particularly I should say when it takes this sort of activist form, which it certainly has overseas recently. And apocalypticism more generally was almost non-existent in Iraq, in the Middle East, before the 2003 preemptive invasion. I mean, that's just an empirical fact. Uh, so I mean it really was our, our attack, which was seen by both Sunnis and Shiites as a clear fulfillment of prophecy, prophecy, uh, which talks about these, these, you know, multiple, uh, incursions and then occupations by the Byzantines, uh, the Eastern Romans, um, of Muslim lands, and how that, that's, you know, this is a harbinger of the end.

0:56:49 Thomas: For example, when Obama, I could have this wrong, but I think somewhat recently within the last year, a drone strike took out, if not the leader of ISIS, or did it? Did we take out an ISIS leader the other month? It gets so confusing because it happens so often. But, okay, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm thinking of. And I don't know. So, are you saying that kind of thing specifically might not be the right way to go, might do more harm than good?

0:56:55 Phil: Think we did. I think there was a second in command that we took out.

0:57:20 Phil: That, so I could say I'm much more confident with my claim when it comes to, know, proposals put forth by Trump and Ted Cruz, who talked about carpet bombing. You know, Trump, of course, is talking about Yeah, well, but those are, I mean, that's been, you know, American policy. We started the Iraq war with shock and awe, So I mean that that's, you know, that had that is what sort of initiated this whole situation.

0:57:32 Thomas: Well, those are easy. Those are freebies. Right.

0:57:51 Phil: And then I so I think so there's more surgical attacks. It's much harder to say it's it's really, it's really difficult to know whether or not they're advisable, because there's a sense in which, you know, Graham Wood has argued, you know—one of the Islamic State's beliefs right now is that there will be a total of 12 caliphs before the world ends. And historically, the Islamic State, their particular ideology, according to their particular idealogy, there have been seven rightly guided caliph. So Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the eighth. So you can do the math. I mean, I mean, there's just a few more before the world ends. Some people have suggested that killing al-Baghdadi would actually increase fervor, excitement, to the Islamic State because there would be the sense that we're one caliph closer to the end of the world.

0:58:50 Phil: So it's hard to say. But then again, if the Islamic State, not many people think this, but the Islamic State doesn't have a next caliph ready to go, then it could result in complete disarray and perhaps even the weakening or even dissolution of the organization. So I don't know. I mean, a lot of my suggestions are, let's not put ourselves in the situation where we have to answer these really, really, really hard questions about how to move forward.

0:59:20 Thomas: Well, let's see. Yeah, I suppose it's easier to say now in retrospect than it is, you know, how

0:59:25 Phil: Yeah, well, I would totally agree with you, but there is a lesson to be learned. I mean, there will be future incidents. I mean I argue in the Skeptic article that apocalyptic terrorism will significantly increase in the future, and I believe that that's true. I hope I'm wrong. I think there are things we could do to make me wrong. But I think that that is what's going to happen. In other words, there will be future situations in which Americans die, Westerners suffer, we have a choice about how to respond. And I think at the very least, we need to make sure that we don't make the same mistakes. And, you know, We need to to battle the ideology rather than the terrorists, which is What? Yeah.

1:00:17 Thomas: Do we battle the ideology? How does that even, because I sometimes wonder, I mean, I don't have any solution. Again, I have no solutions, but I do hear this like, oh, we need to try to fight the ideology, fight the narrative, but what does that involve? I mean because we're not getting to these people, are we? I means are we able to speak to them and like, let's have a debate about these these ideas, you know, like, is there any tangible way we're doing that?

1:00:41 Phil: Um, Is there any way we're doing that? Uh, not as much as we should, but there are ways there There are ways we could do it. I mean, one is, is almost never is it better to use bullets and bombs to try to swing people's opinions. Um, the, what you need to do, I mean, Majid Nawaz, I think, is a great example. He identifies as a Muslim. He's trying to work with more moderate Muslim communities to prevent individuals from becoming radicalized. And I think that is the long-term solution, is to change the culture by working with individuals who are in the Muslim community but have moderate views. Use. And essentially, you know, they have ethical systems that more or less align with ours in the West. So, I mean, I think that's the best thing to do. I do think there's a whole, I mean, another thing is, you know, there's another generation that we're going to have to deal with here.

1:00:49 Thomas: Okay, what's a tangible way we could be doing it? Well, sure, yeah.

1:01:45 Phil: The Islamic State, for example, has raised what they called Cubs of the Caliphate, which is the younger younger generation, uh, you know, who have been inculcated with, you know, all of the propaganda about the West, some of which is kind of true. Other, you know, other aspects are utterly false and just distortion distorted and so on. So, I mean, there, there are, there have been studies, you know, about the psychological impacts of war on the younger generation, um, 2003. I mean, that, that was, you know, there were kids who are, you know, 15, 16, who have lived through this extraordinary conflict and are no doubt traumatized, uh, in a, you know, extraordinary ways, lifetime, you know, in, in irreversible and indelible ways.

Um, they'll never be the same. They'll ever think normally. They'll probably never feel, uh, normally, uh, towards the U.S. or have, you know, have sort of warm feelings towards the U.S. So, yeah, I think, I think the, you know, we need to look at the, the next generation beyond that and and work with the Muslim community to affect change in as peaceful a way as possible, because it's genuinely true, as some terrorist scholars have said, I mean, you, every bomb you drop, you create more terrorists. Um, there's even, you know, one, one, uh, famous scholar who actually disagrees with, uh,

1:02:16 Thomas: Well,

1:03:09 Phil: He tends to emphasize us foreign policy a bit more, but he does have a very insightful line, which is that terrorism is more of a demand driven phenomenon than a supply limited phenomenon. And that gets exactly at exactly what I was saying before that you could either fight the terrorists or try to attack the ideology. So far we've done a lot of whack-a-mole and we've only ended up with the most powerful terrorist organizations in history.

1:03:33 Thomas: Okay, we're way over time, but I gotta ask, okay, what I see what people would call the regressive left doing, and maybe they are trying to fight the ideology. So, let's say we buy off on that premise, which I think is right. I I mean, I agree, it would be far better if we could fight the ideology than fight with bullets and bombs.

1:03:54 Phil: Yeah.

1:03:55 Thomas: But is the answer to do what people are doing and say, no, Islam is a religion of peace. These terrorists are, they're wrong. Is that the answer? That's kind of an interesting conundrum because it's like you have to say something false in order to get to, because Islam is not a religion. I mean fundamentally, if we're going to define it by what's in the Quran and all that, it's It's not, we could define it other ways and that's fine, but if it's defined by, you know, its adherence, then ISIS is every bit as religious and et cetera. So, is that the way? I mean, do you think that makes progress? Would you, how should we be talking about ISIS? Should we be referring to them as Muslim? Should we Be, you Know, what are your views on that?

1:04:38 Phil: Yeah, yeah. Um, I think that's also a complicated issue. And I know people want something really simple and bite-sized, but it's just not. I would, again, affirm that Islam is a crucial factor in, you know, I don't, you know, it is a combination of Islam and various material conditions that result. So Islam is certainly to blame to some extent. In. So therefore, you might reason, well, we should properly identify, we should name, you know, the part of the root cause of Islamic terrorism. And, you know—so I actually asked Will McCance about this, and I sort of agree with his answer, which was, there's a way in which calling it Islamic terrorism could play into—and there's lots more to say about this—but it In a sense, it validates them as an Islamic group, the same way that – is the KKK Christian?

1:04:45 Thomas: Oh,

1:05:45 Phil: I don't know. They think they are. In a sentence, they definitely are. I mean they believe in the book and the Trinity and so on. Um, but calling them Christian perhaps gives them a bit more sort of legitimacy than than you otherwise otherwise might want, not might, uh, not have wanted to give them. The same, I think it's, that's especially the case with the Islamic State, where it's very important to them that they're seen as, you know, the true Muslims, the true believers in the world. Everybody else, uh, is, um, is an infidel, an unbeliever, and so on. So there's, I feel like there is a argument which is substantive in a certain respect for not using the term, but I also think there is another equally strong argument for, um, you know, Majid Noz is a big fan of calling it what it is, uh, and I, I think it is, there's another sense in which it's extremely important to properly identify the phenomenon.

1:06:44 Phil: But there is not an easy answer here. I always use the term Islamic terrorism myself. But I think that's mostly because of the audience, the particular Western audience that I am speaking to. I think if I were, in other words, a government official, I might think twice. I might try to think more strategically and develop more sophisticated views about whether or not using that term more likely to result in a good outcome than not.

1:07:18 Thomas: Yeah. I don't know. Look, I'm not necessarily looking for an easy answer, but we do need to do one or the other. We do kind of need an answer, so I don't know. So you think for a state official, it might be wise, and maybe that's why Obama has done this, to avoid calling it by its name?

1:07:25 Phil: Yeah.

1:07:41 Phil: So I think Will McCance said something to the extent of, you know, so I asked him if he thinks it's okay, if it's warranted and so on. And he said, It really depends on the reasons. If somebody is not doing it because they don't understand that, as Graham Wood wrote in his now famous Atlantic article, What ISIS Really Wants, that the Islamic state is Islamic, very Islamic. So if they're saying that because they don't understand that they're driven by this actual apocalyptic ideology in which they expect the, you know, the end of days messianic figure called the Mahdi to arise at any point, you know, to meet the Romans on the fields of Debek and so on, then that is a wrong reason.

1:08:27 Phil: You know, that's a failure to deeply understand the nature of this group. But on the other hand, if somebody is not doing it because they don't want to play into a narrative that the Islamic State has constructed in which they are seen and recognized widely by other governments and so on as an Islamic entity, then perhaps there's an argument for avoiding the term then.

1:08:54 Thomas: Man, I don't know. It's just so hard to fathom and to try to come to terms with the strategy of really telling a lie by omission because it might not feed into their narrative. It's a tough one for me. I do see the argument. It's interesting and worth thinking about. But well, shoot, we're way over time. Thanks so much for joining me, Phil. As usual, too much to talk about in too little time. So we got to cut it a bit abruptly there. Sorry for that. But thanks so mucho for all your thoughts and giving us so much to think about.

1:09:32 Phil: For having me. I really appreciate it.

1:09:33 Thomas: Where should people find you?

1:09:36 Phil: My Twitter handle is at XRiskology. And my website for the XRisks Institute is www.risksandreligion.org.

1:09:50 Thomas: Right, and I'll definitely link that. That. But is your preferred thing Twitter? Are you active on Twitter? I don't see you post all that much, but at least when you write an article.

1:09:56 Phil: Yeah, I'm at least an avid spectator on Twitter. So yeah.

1:10:02 Thomas: Yeah. You know, I was the same way for the longest time. I was like, oh, shoot, I guess I need to be tweeting because I have these followers, but I thought I was just going to read a bunch of stuff. Okay. Well, thanks again so much for coming on. I really love it. It's fun to talk to you. But, you know, no easy answers, but that's that's how life is, I guess.

1:10:24 Phil: All right. Yeah. Thanks so much. Take care.

1:10:24 Thomas: All right.

1:10:44 Thomas: Alright, well, it is a long episode, but I still absolutely must thank my new patrons. I'm not sure when the last time I got to thank you guys is. We've got a ton of them. Thank you so much for your pledges over at patreon.com slash atheist. You got, by the way, patrons already got access to about 30 minutes of Andrew Torrez's next episode in which we talked about the David Smalley thing and the Christian Mingle lawsuit. So, hey, pledge a dollar over at patreon.com slash atheist and you already get that kind of early stuff. So check that out. All right. Thank you so much to new patrons. Shiran Kochavi, Hunter Ash. Very big thanks to Hunter Ash, Jaded Zappa, Sammie. Very, very big thanks to Sammie as well. Two very generous patrons who happened to sign up around the same time.

1:11:34 Thomas: Thank you Brandi, thank you Martin Fidel, thank you Beth Swope, Steve Probst, Krista Maney, Scott, Sandra Whitson, and Andrew Torrez Pledge. He definitely didn't have to, but he's just that kind of guy. Andrew Torrez, so nice of you, thanks for the pledge. Alright, I'm going to also thank my all-time greats. That would be Sammie and Hunter Ash, now leaders of the pack over on pledge amounts. A long Blackhawk with a pledge so long that I have to say that every time. Inciting Incident Podcast, Kaylee Reiser, Zimu Zinu Jr., Adrian Borschoff, Jonathan Moyet, Jay Alden Waltz, Steve Sigmund, Peter Skelton, Brian Gearfort, Dale, Matt Garrett, Ian Rosano, Samantha, thank you. Thank you for being my top patrons and for supporting interesting Interesting conversations like this one that we just had.

1:12:26 Thomas: And guys, I'm serious. It was two hours of the Second Amendment with Andrew Torrez, and it was riveting, the entire two hours. I'm telling you. I think I'm going to try to just do... Actually, it might have been more than two hours... I'll try to only do two episodes. I'll do two really long episodes. But it was so fascinating. So that's next week. Look forward to that. Thanks again so much to Phil Torres. That was was also an equally fascinating episode this week. And check him out over at xRiskology on Twitter. And thanks. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next week.