YouSaid · the spoken record

Graeme Wood

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33

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2020-09-03

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2020-09-03

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1. “If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free, and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samparas.org.”

   2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Having to resort to lethal force. And if you've decided to just go out to a random car dealership with your AR fifteen because you don't think the cops are going to defend those precious cars, you're someone who's not avoiding violence at all, right? You're putting yourself in a very tenuous circumstance in front of a mob and it's totally irresponsible in the end. That part can't be defended. And yet everything subsequent to that might have been.”

   2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “To several aphorisms at this point, better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6. In certain cases, obviously I would agree with that. But the real heuristic here is if you are going to be someone who assumes the responsibility, the real responsibility of real self-defense, right? If you're going to have firearms train with firearms, think of the scenarios under which you would use firearms, right? You're going to be the sheriff of your own life in the end. And you understand that calling 911 is not actually a self-defense plan. You have to avoid violence at virtually every cost, right? Avoidance has to be your master's strategy because it's only if you've practiced that impeccably do you know that you will be justified if you find yourself”

   2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “When you know you have a gun, with concealed carry that's its own burden ethically and tactically, right? I mean, just you can have a gun on you and no one can see it, and still there are many doors closed to you. You cannot afford to get into a wrestling match with someone or a shoving match or a boxing match in the kind of ordinary range of interpersonal violence. When you have a gun on your belt, which at any moment you might decide to draw or you might fall out in a scuffle or it might be seen by the other person, I mean, just everything is potentially lethal. And you have to think through what you're going to do if you start losing a fight and you are armed is a different situation. Now, obviously, anyone who's a true firearms person will have recourse.”

   2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “It's a decision that so many people are making. Everyone who shows up to one of these protests or shows up anywhere, you know, whether it's in counter protests to the protest they don't like or it's their own protest, as we saw against lockdown earlier in the pandemic. Anyone who shows up armed, you know, carrying an AR-15 or any firearm, some of these people have thought it through and are just happy to run the risk. But the reality is that the presence of a gun completely changes the dynamic of any interpersonal violence.”

   2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Of so if you care about self defense, well, then it really has. You have to put the self back in self-defense. And therefore, you need guns and you need to train with them and you need to take selfies of yourself walking around in the woods with your AR-15 and become one of those guys. And then you hear about this breakdown in social order a few miles away from where you live, and you decide you're going to be this high testosterone good Samaritan. get out there and put yourself between the forces of chaos and the social order that still needs to be maintained and you're going to protect people's businesses as I think Cow Rittenhouse was intending to do at least that's been reported and there's you know this footage of him cleaning up graffiti earlier in the day I think and then he's he's interviewed by somebody and”

   2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Yeah, and all of this is coupled to what is now known as the Ferguson effect, where cops, because they don't want to wind up on YouTube on what seems to be the wrong end of yet another lethal encounter which in their world may in fact have been a justified shooting, they're just gonna stop policing proactively and crime rates are probably soaring as a result of that. So the Rittenhouse thing is interesting because so you have someone who draws the obvious lesson, especially right of center here politically, that we have the Second Amendment for a reason, it only makes sense to get really into guns and personal protection because you really can't delegate the protection of yourself and your family to the cops at a minimum. They're just usually not there when you need them and they're going to show up too late to do anything other than hopefully solve the crime that you were the victim.”

   2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “What is your actual allegation or concern there that the cops have put the riders on a sufficiently long leash for reasons of justifying their own office? Like luckily, are you sure you want to defund us? Well, let's take a look at what's going to happen tonight when we just sit on our hands.”

   2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “of the most affluent cities, cops would not protect property. I mean, you know, potentially there's an argument for that, but it's probably not a great one. And in response to the protest, we had the worst of all possibilities. We had cops essentially saying they would not protect property, and they wouldn't even be diligent in protecting the people who tried to protect their own property from being violently attacked by mobs. We all saw a footage of store owners being beaten by mobs. But what they would do is they would kick the shit out of peaceful protesters, right? That's what the cops were up for. So it was like if you wanted to create a machine to amplify cynicism and a commitment to a kind of vigilante, you know, take matters into your own hands ethic, you could not have done better than these last few months with the spectacle.”

   2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And a certain kind of person to spend a lot of time doing this, and it's going to select for people who have that fondness for firearms and self-defense training and joining militias. And the Kyle Rittenhouse kind of person. And then we wind up in this other terrible place on the landscape, which is once you get any kind of breakdown in social order, once cops get pushed far enough on the back foot such that they're not doing the kind of policing we would expect them to do, right? Once they have essentially announced nationwide that they won't protect property, which they de facto have, just by example, we saw this in the first wave of protests and riots that even in the most affluent parts”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Yeah, no, I would totally agree with that. And this is a nice segue into the Kyle Rittenhouse phenomenon because if you become a student of this kind of violence, yes, you can get an outsized sense of how common it is. I mean, so really what I just to make clear what I was recommending, it's like if you're not someone who really knows a lot about violence, if you haven't studied it, if you haven't trained in anything, right, if you just don't know how hard it is to shoot what you're aiming at, you know, especially when that thing is moving. If you're just not informed, don't have a strong opinion about these things, right? Don't go in like that now's a good time to burn down the local sporting goods store over this or support others doing likewise when you just don't know what's going on. It also attracts, it is a kind of bug light. It attracts a certain kind of mind.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Find out more about the precursors to that event. There's no reason to even talk about race at this point. That's what's so sickening. My hypothesis is that virtually every mention of race is counterproductive now in our society. It's virtually only going to push society in one direction, which is greater polarization, greater derangement, greater hysteria, less contact with actual facts, and it's also going to increase the likelihood that we're going to get four more years of Donald Trump.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “is going on. And then there's the fact that I think a taser was used before the video picks up and failed. But, you know, people think that tasers are magic. Why not always use them? Well, they're not magic and they often fail. And they're more dangerous than a neck restraint, which has now been ruled illegal, right? Because it's if you tase someone and it works and they fall to the concrete and hit their head, you know, that is virtually always worse than actually being choked out in a jiu-jitsu class. So people have to become better students of this kind of violence before they have these reactions that seem to justify burning down half a city or writing headlines which attest yet again in the loudest possible way that we have a real problem of lethal racist violence perpetuated by cops because again”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “We're living in a society where cops shoot a guy in the back in front of his kids, right, with an apparent intent of killing him, right, as a way to pacify him. I mean, how did we get here? This is completely insane and unacceptable. But once the wheels begin to come off in an encounter like this, there are very few options open to people who don't have all the tools that might be possible there. Again, cops of sufficient strength and training could have easily taken this guy down and held him down. He wouldn't have been injured in the end, right? So there's an absolute”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Yeah, well, I want to talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse episode because that does strike me as more complex and interesting in the end and has pretty wide implications. But yeah, just to reiterate something you said there about the Jacob Blake shooting and what it's like to have seen a lot of these videos. What you have to know is that every permutation of this kind of encounter has happened. So you can find video again with the race of everyone swapped in and out, right? You can find video where the guy reaches into his car, pulls out a gun, and shoots the cop in the face, and kills him, right? And every cop knows about those kinds of encounters, right? So it's just, you have to game this out more fully than your knee-jerk reaction may admit of, which is it is just awful.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “safe procedure is done in every jiu-jitsu school in the country every day of the year and if it had any high rate of lethality you would just be seeing people die all over the country all the time in jiu-jitsu training and this is now i think it's illegal in new york now and maybe illegal in other states for cops to even attempt this What you have done when you remove that tool, you have made it far more likely that cops are going to have to resort to lethal force because they can't is really one of the only ways to incapacitate someone so that you can cuff them if you're going to rely on your grappling skills. And so it's just everything is upside down here. But again, I would love to know if you disagree with anything I said about what we can glean from that video.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “That allowed for any cop with a modicum of training to take him down and hold him down, and the fact that they couldn't do that suggests that there's a serious recruitment problem and training problem. And we know this is true, nationwide. And so that's something to be worried about and rectified. But, I mean, even there, people's intuitions about what cops should be doing, should be allowed to do. All of this has run off the rails in mainstream media. It's a point of seemingly absolute consensus that cops should never use, you know, a rear neck restraint, otherwise known as a rear naked choke, because some number of people have died under those conditions or seem to have died under those conditions, and they can in many cases that that was not, in fact, their cause of death. Whereas a rear naked choke is in fact, if done appropriately, remarkably”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Gun. I mean, this is not the default assumption perhaps in Western Europe, but in the US, it absolutely has to be. Our failures of gun control are relevant here. But the idea that cops are performing some kind of lynching by shooting someone in the back because he has fought them off, ran around his car, and opened the door and reached in, that's just, it's just completely untrue given a cop's eye view of the world. I think that the only thing I want to say here, and I'll turn it over to you, that really does put the onus on the cops, is clearly they lacked the training or capacity to control him physically and take him down so that they wouldn't have to use lethal force, right? I mean, like cops who actually could restrain somebody could have easily restrained him. He was outnumbered. He was walking away from them in a way.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Or a black man shot in the back seven times in front of his kids by white cops, right? And it is just, it's an article of faith that the skin color of all involved is absolutely relevant here and worth emphasizing. And it's also an article of faith that all of these details have some moral opprobrium attached to them, like it is assumed that the cop could never be justified in shooting someone in the back in an encounter like this, whereas if you understand how violence evolves and you understand that we're living in a society in the US where every police officer has to assume that everyone they are dealing with is either potentially armed and if they're reaching for something in their car, they are very likely reaching for a”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “And their guns are already drawn at this point, but I think it's from other video. I think it's pretty clear that there was a kind of wrestling match happening, and then he broke away. And then you have fully three cops, if memory serves, pursuing him around his car and he's now opening his door to either get into his car to drive away or reaching into the driver's side of the car for something. It's not clear from the video. And then he gets shot seven times in the back, and now he is, I believe, still in some terrible state and very likely paralyzed, though I think it seems likely he'll survive at this point. And this encounter gets summarized virtually everywhere in mainstream media as this is not a verbatim quote, but this is a paraphrase of virtually every summary I've seen, yet another black man shot by white cops.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “And applications of violence, lethal, and not, and justified in not to say that the story is not certainly not a clean Black Lives Matter story of us having an epidemic of racist police violence against young black men. That is just, the statistics don't bear that out. I would just say to our listeners, you have to listen to my two-hour walkthrough this morass titled Can we Step Back from the Brink or Can we pull back from the brink? One of those. But so when I look at a video like this, and I'd be interested to know if you see this differently, we clearly see a person who has been resisting arrest. I don't know to what degree he fought with the cops before the video starts, and we see him just essentially moving away from the cops.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yeah, well, I think our sanity depends on our being that way. So let's just wind this all the way back to the Jacob Blake shooting, which was the proximate cause of all of this chaos. What happened there, to my eye, again, you were talking at one point in time, and you know, who knows what facts will come out in subsequent days or weeks we might learn a lot about the cops there. We might learn that they're all members of the local chapter of the KKK, and therefore racism could have been a conscious motive on their parts. But when I see a shooting like that, within the frame of that video, the color of everyone's skin is totally irrelevant. I've seen videos like that where white people are getting shot. I've seen videos like that where black people are getting shot by black cops. And, you know, I've talked at sufficient length about the statistics of all of these encounters with cops.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Seems to me to be pandering to Black Lives Matter in a way that's just inaccurate. I should explain why I think that. But I think he also said that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist at one point, not in his speech, but I think on Twitter, I think that his campaign released something about white supremacists in a way that was clearly referencing the Rittenhouse shooting. I don't think there's any evidence that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. Is there? I mean, obviously things can change by the day, but at the time we're having this conversation, do you know of any evidence that suggests that?”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “So Biden, as of yesterday, I think we'll release this a few days hence, but we're recording the day after he gave his speech in Pittsburgh, and the purpose of which was to put some daylight between him and the caricature of him that Donald Trump tried to paint, aligning him with the left and the pro chaos, pro looting, anti capitalist, you know, far left, which exists and is clearly worth disavowing. I assume you saw that speech. I was pleasantly surprised that he took the line that he did, and I thought it was pretty effective, but he does still get enough wrong as part of his talking points that given enough time he doesn't do himself too many favors here. So when he talks about police violence, virtually everything he says.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Nowhere near where you put it at the Atlantic. Not only would they not acknowledge that he gets anything right, but just everything is upside down in how they describe what's happening with police violence and social protests. I mean, NPR just published a wonderful interview, which I think you noticed, informing all of humanity that looting was essentially a moral imperative and a great form of social protest because small business owners are really no better than big business owners and they all deserve to have their stuff stolen. And this was presented on the NPR website without any, there wasn't a single critical question, if I recall correctly. It was just like, this is practically NPR's position on looting.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Yeah, don't trust the CDC in the middle of a pandemic when you have to decide whether to send your kids back to school. It really is unbelievable we're in this situation. Well, let's talk a little bit about the violence we've seen because this is a place where I see everyone left of center seeming to get virtually every specific claim wrong. And I'm someone who, as I think you know, is more concerned that we not re-elect Donald Trump than most people. I mean, certainly I would put my anti-Trump bona fides up against anybody. On the left or the center or among the never Trump Republicans. But it is crazy making and deeply concerning that the left seems to the bar is”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “There's a kind of a moral panic component to a lot of what's going on. And there are very few level-headed people in the media whose inclination is to turn down the temperature on things. The business model of media is to be a shrill and sensational as possible so that partisans amplify your message. So yeah, there's a way in which this is a runaway train or at least feels like one that worries me for which I really don't have any it just seems deeply unfamiliar to be living through.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “In the White House and the Prospect of Either him being re elected or there being a real unwillingness to accept the results of an election that goes against him, it seems like a very risky time we're in. And the thing that is so disconcerting for me just on an hourly basis is to see how things are distorted in what used to be the most reliable sources of news for us, right? I mean, I feel like now I can count on the New York Times to get crucial things wrong with respect to what's happening with protests and police violence, say, and wrong in a way that just amplifies political partisanship and hysteria on the part of people who actually decide to go in the streets, you know, and certainly hysteria on social media. And so I feel like...”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Seem, you know, as recently as the beginning of April far fetched to me, and I just felt like it was worth talking about because it was possible. But, you know, if you had asked me then, I certainly didn't feel it was likely. And so now I'm interested to consider how many of us have now kind of reset our expectations. And this seems like the new normal. And we're not actually entertaining how much worse things could get. And it would seem like scaremongering to sincerely entertain that. But there is a kind of slide towards something unrecognizable, at least in our lifetimes here. Obviously, their comparisons with the sixties and there was a fair amount of social unrest then. I don't know if I'm sure there are many disanalogies there as well. But with Trump.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Yeah, I remember I did a podcast in the beginning of April with Stanley McCrystal and Chris Fossle, his partner. Forgive me, Chris. I can't recall whether you pronounce your last name Fussle or Fusil or some other variant there. But anyway, I remember having this conversation with them and talking about the prospect of a breakdown in social cohesion under COVID. And I remember, I think I actually telegraphed this in the conversation, but if I didn't, I was certainly thinking it, that I was worried that I was being a scaremonger for even just hypothesizing that this was possibly on the menu or worth thinking through, right? Just that things could fray enough so that there would be violence in the streets, that our political partisanship could turn violent. It really did”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “And police violence and the political ramifications of what happened in Kenosha and Portland. Actually, now I recall that the first time we met was around this topic of violence. Actually, I got into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and you wrote a piece in The Atlantic on that. And that's what you came out and sort of introduced you to my midlife crisis around all things jiu-jitsu and self-defense. It's kind of full circle for our conversation. But give me your general sense of what we're living through at the moment in the US.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “So, domestically, I think I want to focus on all the ways in which the United States has begun to resemble a failing state. You obviously know what it's like to be in a failed state or to focus on it, but it seems to me we're dealing with trends in public opinion and disinformation and failures of sense making, a breakdown of trust in institutions, political polarization, failures of leadership that I haven't even contemplated in my lifetime, I don't think. I mean, perhaps I was just too young to understand how bad it was at various points earlier in my life. But this just seems like an unraveling that is fairly disconcerting. You know, I'm happy to go wherever you want to go, but I thought we could talk through what's been going on with social protests.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “And you've been on the podcast before you wrote a great book on the Islamic State, which we discussed, The Way of the Strangers. So people are encouraged to listen to that if they want to get your expertise on all things related to jihad. But generally, can you summarize your focus as a writer? I mean, you write mainly for The Atlantic and cover really interesting stuff.”

    2020-09-03 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #216 — A Conversation with Graeme Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source