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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, just a brief housekeeping here. I hope you all enjoyed the beginning of the Oliver Burkeman series on time management that I previewed here in the last episode. Again, the rest of that will soon be appearing over at Waking Up in our New Life section. And the whole point of this section is to bring relevant philosophy and science to bear on the question of how to live a good life. And that will include conversations between me and outside experts, but also courses designed by other people. And we have some interesting courses already in the works there. Also, I enjoyed the previous podcast with Peter Zion and Ian Bremmer. That was a new format where I invited a subject matter expert to ride shotgun with me and help facilitate a conversation that was somewhat outside my wheelhouse. Perhaps I'll do more of that or even begin moderating some debates here. Thought about doing that for a while, and this seems like a good provocation in that direction. And also just a reminder that we launched the Best of Making Sense podcast, where we surface some of the evergreen episodes from previous years. I know many of you are enjoying that, but for those of you who haven't discovered it, it is a separate podcast where subscribers to Making Sense get full episodes, and otherwise we release half episodes in podcasters everywhere. Okay, today I'm speaking with Mark Andreessen. Mark is a co founder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is one of the few people to pioneer a whole software category used by more than a billion people, and one of the few to establish multiple billion dollar companies. Mark co created the first proper Internet browser, Mosaic, which then became Netscape, which he later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co founded Loud Cloud, which as Opswear was sold to Hewlett Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett Packard from 2008 to 2018. Mark holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, and he serves on the board of several and recent Horowitz portfolio companies applied, Intuition, Carta, Dialpad, Honor, Open, Gov, and Samsara Networks. And he is also on the board of Meta, otherwise known as Facebook. And in this episode, we cover a lot of ground. We talk about the current state of Internet technology and culture some of what has gone right, but there is much that is in the process of going wrong. We discuss mark's background in tech. The birth of the internet, how advertising became the business model for digital media. We talk about the three stages of the web and the birth of blockchain. How successful technology reorders status and power in society. The bitcoin white paper, the mystery surrounding the identity of satoshi nakamoto, the importance of distributed consensus. Bitcoin as digital gold. How society has performed during COVID james burnham and managerial capitalism. The ubiquitous principal agent problem negative externalities risk and regulation, trust and institutions. What the fuck happened in 171? Regulatory capture, banning trump and Alex jones from social media, perverse incentives and philanthropy and other topics. Anyway, I really enjoyed this conversation. Mark knows a lot about a lot, and he's a very fast talker. I'm a slow talker. So those of you who listen to this podcast on two x are probably screwed for this one. Anyway, I now bring you mark andreessen. I am here with mark andreessen. Mark, thanks for joining me. Hey, sam, it's great to be here. So we have a lot to talk about. You are a man of many talents and wide experience, and we haven't hung out much, but I've spoken to you enough to get a glimmer of your polymathic intentions, if not actual achievements. It's really obviously you cover an incredible range of material in your just in your information diet. And I want to get into what you're most focused on and worried about these days. And I also want to talk about your background a little bit because people will know some of it. But I think in having you recapitulate a little bit of that journey into tech, you might be able to give us some insights as to what we should be thinking about now. But first, at a high level, how do you describe yourself these days in terms of what you do professionally and what you focus on? Yeah, so my career has had three stages so far. So stage one was an engineer, and I was trained as an engineer. And sort of that sort of method of engineering is kind of central to everything, as it turns out, that at least I do and think about. Then I became an entrepreneur. So I went into business despite having taken zero business courses and sort of went to the school of hard knocks. And so I went into business and started originally my first company with my partner jim clark in 94, and then my second company with ben horowitz in 99, and then so forth and so on. And then phase three, starting in 2009, was to become an investor, professional investor, venture capitalist. And so that's phase three. And then maybe someday one more phase. But at least those three have come to be busy so far. So what does it mean to be a venture capitalist basically think of it as like we're a hub that's the sort of center of flows of basically ideas, people and money would be the way to think about it. So we try to stand the leading edge of all the new areas of technology. We try to know all the really smart people who are working on new technology and want to be part of the technology ecosystem. And then we actually raise money and we invest money and we invest in startups. We get very deeply involved in the companies. We are typically on the board. We're very often the founders kind of main outside confidant advisor. We get the call when things go horribly wrong and try to pitch in and help, then try to maximize the success for the companies. That kind of hit a chord. Yeah. And how would you describe your politics at this point? So I would say mostly I'm sort of, you know, on an ice flow all by myself headed slowly out to sea. I think there's a few people on that flow with you probably at least on nearby flows drifting together apart. I could go in length about this. I was always kind of a centrist Democrat like basically everybody else I knew in in Tech and in The Valley. The Valley is like, you know, 99%. The picture always gets painted. The Valley is a bunch of radical libertarians or something. And in reality it's just like 99%, basically Clinton Democrats and now kind of whatever warren Democrats, Bernie Democrats. And so I was always that up until I call it 2015 2016. And then like everybody else, I was just completely shocked by really by two things. One was Trump winning both the nomination of the election and then also just the huge shift on the left that took place. And so I kind of checked out of traditional politics in 2015 and kind of went on a spirit walk and decided to try to kind of reread everything from scratch and figure out what was going on. And I've kind of come out the other side in sort of a weird, fuzzy, undefined state. So I don't even know that I even apply any labels. I'm not doing anything politically. I'm completely out of it. So I'm mostly just trying to learn and understand at this point more than like half positions. Yeah, well, that describes my own political identity pretty well at this moment. Perhaps we'll get back to that, I think. I don't think we'll focus on politics, but the political context will inform much of what we say about the breakdown and rebuilding or failures of rebuilding around institutions and solving the massive coordination problem of how do we get strangers who don't trust themselves all that much or trust one another all that much to collaborate. But before we talk about your background earlier, again, high level, what would you say have been a few of the influences or life experiences that you currently consider most formative of your worldview on a day to day basis. You know, I think you look part of it was growing up in the sort of, you know, Midwest, I used to think I traveled sort of this weird road from, like, rural agricultural Midwest all the way to kind of high tech Silicon Valley. And it was kind of an unusual thing. And then I discovered years later, I discovered Tom Wolf, the great American novelist, reporter, wrote a long form profile of a guy named Robert Noyce, who was basically the inventor of the microchip and the creator of intel and basically the creator of the tech industry as we know it today. And he wrote this profile of Bob Noyce. And Bob Noyce basically was like an Iowa farm boy who grew up in rural Iowa and then moved to the valley and sort of created the valley, created technologies we know it today. And then Wolf also pointed out that's the story of, like, Philo Farnsworth, who created television and many others and so I always described The Valley is, like, this intersection of, like, 1950 style Midwestern tinkerer engineer. The guys with the brush cuts and the white short sleeve polyester shirts like you see in all the old photos of NASA or something. It's kind of got that kind of square culture engineering, kind of nerd culture. And then it's got the kind of 1960s California counterculture, which is because it happened here. And so that stuff all kind of threaded into it and it's like, balanced on a knife's edge between those two cultures. And so I definitely kind of come out of that kind of former background. So, yeah, I mean, going from there to here was very important. Partnering with my business partner, Jim Clark, was a very successful entrepreneur, was the founder of one of the most successful full companies in the history of the industry. And I kind of got lucky and that I got to work with him at a time when he wanted to start a new company and all the smart people he knew were kind of working at his current company, so he had to go get fresh blood. And I happened to be newly arrived. And so we kind of hooked up and built our company, Netscape. That was formative. the.com crash was a very formative experience. We hit that really hard. And then look, the last 20 years, the fact the internet didn't die after 2000, and there was like a whole second tech boom and then everything kind of magically coming together starting in 2007 or 2008, between the iPhone and broadband and social networking and everything else that created the world we're in today. All this stuff at this point has worked way beyond any expectation any of us could have possibly had. So kind of seeing that all crystallize and come together has really taught me a lot. And then, of course, now we're in whatever weird state we're in today. That's kind of how I got here. So what was your academic background before you became an Internet pioneer? You did a CS degree. Yeah. So it's a classic Midwestern kind of story, which is, of course, the purpose of a college education is to make money. Fairy stuff. And so I went to the US news and World Report issue in, I think, 1988, and I looked up the income levels by a bachelor's degree. And of course, the top degree was electrical engineering at that time. And then I looked for the top double E schools, and the number three school was University of Illinois, which was right across the border. So that made those two decisions easy. I got in school and then discovered I hugely preferred software, which I should have known because I was always coding as a kid. But software double es are tremendously important and have done a lot to build the modern world. But software, there's a level of creativity that's just hard to do in atoms. And so I kind of got seduced by software, and then I got a computer science degree. Let's talk through what happened with Mosaic and Netscape for a few minutes. Most people associate your name with Netscape, but it was Mosaic first, right? You started this company. And what was the name change about what happened there? Well, it didn't start as a company, and so it started as a project. It started as a project at the University of Illinois, and so it started as a federally funded research project at what was at the time called the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which the sort of short version is. Remember when Al Gore said that he invented the Internet? Yeah. It turns out that story is actually largely true in the sense of what he actually said was the full quote was, I took the lead in creating the Internet in the Senate, and that story actually is true, which is in the Senate. The US. Senate in the mid 1980s funded two things that ended up being very important for my career. One was they funded the Internet backbone to end what was called at the time NSFNET, after the National Science Foundation. And then they funded what were called the four national Supercomputing Centers. And one of those just happened to be at the University of Illinois. The significance of that was basically, they just dropped like a ton of money on these four universities, including Illinois, to basically by state of the art computers and then hook them up to the Internet. And this is starting in the mid eighty s. And so by the time I got there in 89, this was kind of underway. And so we had, in retrospect, basically a modern computing, internet networking, broadband, graphical environment, just basically 510 years before the rest of the world. You can kind of see it working. Was that pure serendipity or did you actually know, going to Illinois, that you were going to have access to unusual computer resources? Well, like I said, they were number three ranked for double E nationally. It was like MIT, Stanford, and then University of Illinois. So that reflected that they were top ten CS at the time. So they were by far the best engineering school in the Midwest at that point. And it was just too much of a leap at that point in my life to go to the East Coast or the West Coast. Right. The reason they ranked so high is because they were so central. Like, they had these very advanced programs and all these resources. And so I had a glimmer of it. I knew about it, but I didn't fully understand the import until I got there and I saw it. Right. And then basically and what happened was NSF basically just, like, funded this essentially to build the modern Internet at the time as a research something for scientists at the time. This is back in the days, there was actually illegal to do business on the Internet during this period. Right. There was something called the Acceptable Use Policy that basically banned all commercial transactions. So it was purely a research thing. Nobody really envisioned it having real world applications at that time. It was just kind of for scientists and academics. But there was a research group there that had the job of basically writing software to make the Internet work for people. And we basically had a project that started as kind of a renegade project that became an official project. That was this thing called Mosaic, which was the first browser that kind of got widely used. It kind of pulled in all the functions, made everything graphical, and then made it work really well and fast and secure and so forth. And then everybody started using that on the Internet as it then existed. That was when I was making $6.25 an hour. Yeah. Well, I hope you invested that wisely, because I'm told compounding really works well. Until recently. Yes, until the last two months. So then you formed a proper company, Netscape. And what happened what happened to Netscape as a product? Yeah. Well, so first of all, it was very tenuous that we ever even started that company because there was such a wall of negativity. It was so universally known that the Internet was not something that ordinary people would ever use. Right. And if you read the newspapers and magazines at the time, they were just wall to wall when they wrote about the Internet. It was primarily either as an object of curiosity that would never matter or negatively. If this thing is never going to move, what year are we now? 93. 94. Right. Okay. Yeah. 92. 93, 94. The first issue of Wired Magazine. I bought the first issue of Wired Magazine off the news stand in, I think, 90, early 93. When I was working on Mosaic or late 92, and I remember bought it like four in the morning going do a do a snack run and I saw this thing on the new stand and I, you know, I was excited. It's finally a magazine for me. And I went back to my office and read it from front to back. And it didn't even mention the Internet. Right? No. Okay, I guess I guess I'm on the wrong end of this whole thing. It's not that Wired got anything wrong. It's just that that was universally the view. And all the experts said that and all the big company CEOs said that it's just not going to be a thing. So what was motivating you at that point? Did you actually believe that everyone was wrong and realized that the Internet was going to be a way to not only get rich, but just basically do more or less everything that was going to prove indispensable in the future? Or were you just tinkering and following your interest without any big picture vision? So it was actually a process of elimination, which is we kind of tried everything else instead. Basically concluded that, no, it was just going to be the Internet. And so my partner Jim and I actually had other business plans that we kind of cycled through, trying to do at the time, interactive television was this big idea. And then we tried to do we had a plan for an online gaming network that's sort of like what Xbox Live today is today. We basically work through all these other ideas for kind of advanced AOL at that point was starting to work a little bit. So it's like, what would it mean to do one of those like a proprietary consumer service? And we kind of kept we had the startup mentality of like, okay, let's from scratch make a business plan for building a company that does anything like this. And basically we cycled through all the other ideas and then in the background kind of Mosaic kind of kept growing. Right. It kept going after I left Illinois and more people were using it and it was just like and I still had my email log in and so I had the account. Mosaic was free for academic use, but we put a provision in the license that said you have to pay for commercial use. And we just did that as a placeholder because we didn't have a business model in Illinois. But I had the email box where people would send in commercial inquiries, where they would want to do something in the commercial sector with ecommerce or whatever. And so there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these messages coming in from people who wanted to do crazy things like, I want to build a bookstore on the Internet. Like, that's crazy. Lose my email. Jeff yeah, exactly. Well, actually prejeff right prejudice. Even before that, at some point, Jim and I literally looked at each other and were like, okay, this inter Internet thing might actually be the thing. Like, maybe all these other experts are just wrong. Maybe this actually is the correct thing. And look, the Internet had all kinds of problems and issues that I could take you through, and that's a long litany of people had all these complaints about it that were correct. It's not secure and you can't do transactions and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's not fast, right? And it's like, well, look, if the network effect really takes and lots of people sign up to use this and lots of businesses come online, then it's going to drive an investment wave that's going to solve all these other problems, which is basically what happened. And so we kind of did what, in retrospect, was the obvious decision, which is we just leaned in hard on that. Right. And how did the business model get anchored to ads? Because of all the things that could have gone differently in the beginning and maybe the tech wasn't there. You just said there was no way to pay for things, but it seems like that could have been an early priority. And I'm not sure you entirely share my view of just how diabolical the ad based economy has been in the end. But I wonder what was that moment like where you just slap a banner ad on it and that's how you monetize the future of digital media? Yeah, so it's because we had no native money, all right? We had no native ability to do money. We had no way to do microtransactions. We knew this at the time. So we knew right upfront front, we were like, look, there needs to be a way to send and receive money. There needs to be a way to do ecommerce. There needs to be a way to do microtransactions. We knew this at the time. There were two kind of big things, and we were in a position to do it because we had the browser, but we also had the servers and the ecommerce software and all the back end stuff. And so we were in a position to do all this. So we figured there were two parts to the problem. Part one was cryptography, right? So basically security, right? So to be able to have secure communication and we invented this protocol called SSL for secure cryptography. It's the first widely used kind of delivery of the science of cryptography to consumers. Sort of happened as a consequence of the Netscape browser and SSL. And by the way, that's still in use. SSL is still the encryption method for the Internet today. So that part worked, and then the other part was like, okay, you need to plug into the existing banking system, right? You need to be able to plug in so people can load, have their credit card, their debit card, their bank account, their checking account, because they've got all their money somewhere and they've got be able to kind of get it to the Internet. And so for that, we went and we started talking all the big banks and the big credit card companies, and we got, again, this kind of wall of skepticism. And everybody kind of told us, basically, this is never going to work. And then we got our big meeting that kind of really hammered this home for me. We found this guy I guess I shouldn't name names specifically, but one of the very big credit card companies, let's say yeah, there was a CTO who was like, considered we were told he was like the visionary for the payments industry and the guy that everybody listened to. And it's like, if you can get him on your side, you can really do something here. So we had him to our office. He had not used the Internet or Mosaic or Netscape at that point. So we sat him down in front of a workstation with a keyboard and a mouse and a big screen and, you know, had it all queued up for the demo and said, I basically pointed on the first link on the screen, and I said, Click here. And so, of course, he reaches up with his finger and touches the screen. And this is 1994, right? So there's no touchscreens, so nothing happens. And then I'm like, no, no, you use the mouse. And so then of course, he looks at the mouse, and then of course, he picks it up. Right? How could that possibly be the case? Well, because the entire banking payments industry at that point was on mainframes from 30 years earlier. They didn't do new things. That's not what they were in business to do. And so I remember in that meeting, it was just like, okay, this is it. We're sunk. There's no way this can happen. We tried, microsoft tried, other people tried, AOL tried, and it's just there was never any way to do it. And so if you can't charge people for things and you got to run ads, and that basically is what happened. Maybe give us a short primer on the stages of development. Here we have web one, web two and web three. I'm imagining you envision Web Three as ushering a new age of monetizing everything potentially in a secure, trustless way. So let's climb there. What do we mean by Web One, Two, and Three at this point? Sure. So my partner, Chris Dickson, has sort of the best encapsulation of this. He says Web One was read, right? And so the big breakthrough was you go online, you could read stuff, you could see stuff, you could do search, you could do all this, but you could consume. Web Two was what he calls read, write. Right. And that's sort of the social networking, blogging, video, YouTube kind of user generated content era, right? So not only could you read, you could do what you do. Not only listen, you could produce podcasts. And that led to kind of the whole world that we've been in. And then he says Web Three is read, write, and own, right? And own means you can own value, right? You can own money, you can own digital assets, you can have ownership claims on things, right? You could say read, write, pay. You could say read, write, make money. You could apply whatever term you want to that third one, but basically fill in all of the economics and all of the capability of having incentives and ownership that really should have been there from the start. But like I said, we tried to get in from the start, but we just didn't have the technology. For now, we basically have a chance with these new technologies of blockchain cryptocurrency, web Three. Basically we think a chance to kind of do the other half of the Internet is how I think about it, or the other third. And it's basically have a trust layer, a money layer and an ownership layer that rides on top of the sort of untrusted, unowned kind of space to spend the internet so far and then kind of fill in all the things that we wish we had been able to do from the start but now we can actually do. I wouldn't be alone in noticing that there's a fair amount of skepticism about Web Three at this point and a fair amount of shot and FreudA watching cryptocurrency crash or almost crash in recent months. Do you view that skepticism as truly analogous to all of the naysayers around Web One when they thought the internet was just going to be a bust and that no one was ever going to migrate away from their answering machine, even this email thing wasn't going to take off? Or do you think there is a greater foundation for a perception of misspent dreams and failures, of scaling the technology around the energy concerns, the cost of it all, the capacity for fraud, the tulip mania aspect of the kind of the investing landscape or the speculation landscape there? How much of it is an echo of the early ninety s and how much of this is a genuinely new condition of uncertainty? Yeah, so there's a lot in there and we can go through each of those points. Here's the big thing I'd say overall look, a lot of things just don't work, right? So a lot of people have ideas for things that don't work. And so it's always possible that the critics are correct and it's always possible something thing either is just never going to work, or the other possibility is things are just too early, right? What happens with a lot of new technologies is they just take time. There were people doing analog, there were people doing mechanical television 30 years before Philoharnsworth did electronic television. They did mechanical television, like the 1880s, 1890s, with like spinning wooden blocks representing pixels, right? And so there's this prehistory, and it's like, what was it? Paris had a telegraph system working through flashes of light through long glass tubes under the streets of Paris in like, the 1830s, which is not practical because the tubes kept breaking, but people had that idea way before the telegraph rolled out. Anyway, look for any new technology. Maybe you're just early. Maybe you're just wrong altogether. Maybe it doesn't happen. For the new technologies that do work, you see basically a pattern of the reaction to them. And I used to kind of think I was kind of fantasizing this, and then I found a book that kind of explained this book by this MIT guy named Elton Morrison 50 years ago, where he kind of goes through this is even pre Internet, but he goes through the whole history of new technologies. And he said there's basically a three stage process to the adoption of any new technology. Stage one is just ignore, right, where basically just people pretend it doesn't even exist. And of course, of course, that's, you know, the Internet was ignored basically from the 1960s through to the like I said, even into the even into the early 90s. Stage two is basically vigorous protest. And that's the stage where basically it's like, basically, here are the 30 reasons this can never happen. Or call it the reasons phase, right? So here's the 30 reasons this could never happen. And usually what that is, is a laundry list of everything that's technically wrong with new technology. So the Internet, it was, is too slow and it's not graphical, and it's this and it's insecure and hackers and fraud and all these sort of, you know, basically, by the way, real issues, right? These are all issues that actually had to get fixed and then ultimately were fixed. And then he said stage three. Stage three in the book, he says, is when the name calling begins. And so stage three is basically rage. And what he basically says is it's basically rage. It's basically the existing power structures basically just like go incandescent with rage. And he said the reason for that is because any new technology that works is a reordering of status and power in the system. And basically the stage status quo is what do they hate more than anything else? Reordering of status and power, right? There's only downside for them. And so they just go crazy. And that's when they pull out all the stops and they call you names and they try to put you in jail and they do everything under the sun they can possibly do to sabotage it. And then, look, it has to prove itself, right, to get through those three gauntlets. Like, it has to be a real thing. Like I said, it's not predictive that because something goes through this, it's going to work it's just that every single time something works like this, it goes through these stages. And so at this point, I'm like in nerd to it, right. I've seen it now so many times in the exact same sequence of things that I'm just like, okay, fine, bring it. This is what they're going to do. We're just going to keep going. What percentage of your time and commitment of resources at this point is focused on web three? We might actually need to I know I've done this on other podcasts, but we probably should define web three a little bit more. Just differentiating cryptocurrency from everything else that could be done on the blockchain. But you can do that. But then how much of your attention and material resources are aimed at that at the moment? Yeah, look, it's a very big push for us. We have a very big group in the space now. It's probably a third of I would say you could topline it and say maybe a third of the firm in terms of a combination of people and money. Right. Which for us, it's one of our biggest things. Okay, so give me the potted definition of web three at the moment. Yeah. So let's take the three terms that we kind of get kind of conjoined. So blockchain is like the underlying technological breakthrough. So basically what happened was this person, he, she, it, or they named Satoshi Nakamoto, never identified. Are you swearing that this is not you? It is definitely not me, although if it was, that's exactly what I would be saying. Yes, but still I trust you somehow in this trustless environment. Well, same is true for you. If it was, you'd be pretending to ask me the question without knowing, too. I think it does stand a better chance of being you given our different backgrounds. But do you have any suspicions about who it is or whether it's a single individual? Yeah, there are suspicions. Most of the people in the space think it was a combination of people. It was a deep technological breakthrough and it was one of these things that built on 30 years of prior work. It's one of these things that has kind of a long wind up before it happened. And so it was somebody and he or they posted a lot on forums and you can read all the posts as it was in development, so you can kind of see whoever it was had like, a very deep knowledge in the space. And that kind of reduces it down to pretty small number of candidates, just given the nature of the technology at that time. So it was probably people think it was a handful of those people probably working together. This is the bitcoin white paper, which yeah, one is this 2010 nine 2009. Nine 2009. Well, by the way, profoundly significant. By the way, just profoundly significant. This gets missed, but 2009 was the low of the economy and the stock market and everything else, and the high of unemployment following the financial crisis, right? So it was the last year you would expect a major new break. Like, everybody was in a horrible mood in 2009. I remember very clearly because we started the firm then and everybody was like uniform, formally negative that you could start a new venture capital firm. And so in the middle of just like complete misery and by the way, in the middle of the collapse of the prior financial system, what we call the trad financial system, just being like completely trashed and discredited and falling apart and having to be bailed out, this like, magic thing happens. This paper comes out and it just basically redefines the industry. It was a very special moment. Did you see its significance immediately? No, I didn't. No, I wouldn't claim that. It was something kind of people knew about. Everybody read it, people talked about it a lot. It was like a parlor game in Silicon Valley for the first five years or so, which is like, even in Silicon Valley, it's like, okay, this probably is not going to be a thing like really internet money. Jeez right. Like all the reasons why you shouldn't be able to do that, can't do that, it won't work. But the Silicon valley parlor game of that is less. Maybe some people had foresight and so but a lot of people didn't and a lot of us were like, wow, but wouldn't it be cool if it did? Right? And so then the part of the game was like, wow, what if we always have the joke, it's like on earth too, this stuff is all working, right? And it's like, well, what would earth two be like if it really had bitcoin everywhere? And it was like, wow, this is a really cool idea. And then at some point we and others were just like, okay, we need to stop being idiots here, and basically just be like, yeah, this is actually a thing. This is actually going to happen. This stands a very good chance of actually happening. Accredited our partner, Bolaji Srinivasan was the guy who kind of got us really clued in on this and kind of set us down at one point. And it's like, look, you guys have to stop thinking about this as hypothetical, like, this thing is actually happening. And so we were early relative to the world, but there were other people in the valley who were ahead of us. And is there kind of an initial cache of bitcoin that has not been claimed, which is satoshi's coin or initial wallet that still has the coin sitting in it or what's the story there? Yes, this is part of the great kind of mythic legend behind the whole thing. So all a bitcoin is basically based on this underlying science of cryptography, right, which is an ancient science, but in its modern form. You know, it's a 50, 60 year old kind of thing in terms of the the way we use the technologies now, the so called public key cryptography. And so it's it's all based on that. And as part of that, you can have what are called private keys that are uniquely yours. And as part of that, you can sign messages with your private key and such that anybody in the world can decode them or read them, but only you could have written them. You can have absolute validation that you were the creator. And then bitcoin wallets basically work the same way. Like, you have a private key for the wallet, and anybody who has the private key can decrypt it. It's like a bearer instrument in that way. But anybody who doesn't have the private key, they have no claim to it. Over the years, various people show up and claim to be satoshi, but none of them can demonstrate that they have the private key. None of them can. So therefore, you have nothing. So, anyway, we know how to recognize satoshi when we see it, or they, which is they can use their private key to sign things. They could also use their private key to unlock the money. I don't know what the current value is. I'm going to guess it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 to $50 billion us. Dollars today that is sitting in a wallet somewhere that the satoshi key unlocks. That money has never been touched. That's an extraordinary fact. If it's a single individual or a group of people, I mean, this is even without that, this is one of the best kept secrets ever. But when you look at the treasure, sierra Madre incentives that that are growing with that kind of wealth locked up in a box, how do you explain that this is just this this person is ideologically so pure and enamored of the brilliance of this founding myth and moment that they're just they're not tempted to suddenly own $50 billion? Yes, exactly. So this is the amazing thing, the fact that money was not claimed for a long time, right? And by the way, the messages stopped after the bitcoin white paper came out. Satoshi stopped posting in public. And so and and by the way, you have to pause for a second here to say, how prescient must this person have been to not only develop this thing and write it and create it after basically 30 years of people trying to do the same thing? By the way, this was the breakthrough. How prescient was he, she, or they that not only did they get the technology right, but also they knew ahead of time that they needed to stay anonymous. Right? That's not normal. I've never been anonymous. It's not normal in our industry to be anonymous. And so whoever it is had, like, tremendous foresight to know to do that, and then yeah, to not claim the money. So the prevailing view for a long time was, he, she, it, or they are dead, right? Which is the most obvious thing. And there is at least one candidate for satoshi who did pass away. So it's certainly possible that's the case. It's also possible, by the way, something very embarrassing happened. It's possible he or they forgot their key. Forgot their key, which would be embarrassing, the kind of thing that might torture you for a long time. And then this weird thing happened. I don't remember. There was newsweek magazine did this cover story claiming that they had uncovered satoshi nakamoto. Okay, so this is several years ago now, this huge newsweek cover story, and they said, we found satoshi, and they identified an older gentleman who is a japanese american named Dorian nakamoto who is like an aerospace engineer or something in, I forget, southern California somewhere, like San diego, orange county. And they did this entire expose about he's the guy. And the whole time he's like, I'm not the guy. The guy not I'm. I'm not the guy. I'm not the guy. I'm not the guy. And they're like, yes, you are. In the CS community, we're all like, well, he's not a computer scientist. He seems like he's like a smart engineer, but he doesn't have this background. Like, this seems weird. So, anyway, there was one final message signed by satoshi's private key that came out at that point, and it literally was, I am not Dorian nakamoto. And then satoshi has since gone quiet. And so now we're back to the great mystery, which I don't know, actually. I don't know if I hope it gets solved. The engineering me would like to know, but it may be better for, you know, I think the world should have some mystery to it, and if this is the fundamental breakthrough that sort of is a division and, you know, before and after in civilization, we never find out who the person was. I think there's something romantic about that. So, yeah, I kind of hope we never find out. It's a great story. So I derailed you. You did not yet differentiate bitcoin from all else that can happen on the blockchain. Yeah, so blockchain is the under. So basically the white paper basically came out. The bitcoin white paper. It's very short. People can read it. And basically it says we have this basically a data structure called the blockchain, which is a way to do decentralized permissionless, basically. Data structure that everybody agrees on, which we could talk. Sort of it's sort of a way to do a database. But in a database, that kind of is spread out across the Internet, called that the blockchain, literally a chain of blocks. And then so and the computer science term is distributed consensus. And so if you read the computer science literature like that, that's the thing that was solved. That's the technology breakthrough, like the cold fusion or whatever of the thing and then basically said there's sort of an immediate and obvious use case for this, which is digital money. Because if I have basically a database, an internet wide database that records debits and credits or records ownership of assets, then basically those slots can represent money, they can represent value. And if you own the slot today, you own the money. And if I own the slot tomorrow, I own the money. And there it goes. It's this way to get agreement distributed, consensus. It's a way to get consensus of who owns what across the entire internet. And actually what happens, and this is a subtle point, is the capability of doing digital money is sort of an artifact. It's sort of a natural consequence of having this kind of database. And then, by the way, it turns out you also want a form of digital money to make a blockchain work because you need to pay the miners, right? And so the way the blockchain works is people run the code on their computers, and that costs them some amount of money, primarily in the form of power. Well, they got to buy the computers and they got to power the computers and store them somewhere. And so the way the miners get paid is with the currency that sort of emerges from the system. So you've got the blockchain, which is sort of the infrastructure, and then you've got this like use case, artifact, spin off, emergent thing, which is kind of the coin, the currency that comes out the other end. That was that original pairing. And then immediately upon that release, people started to say, okay, that's great. And the true believers right up front were like, okay, that's great. That's obviously going to happen. And then they basically, right from the beginning, they started saying, okay, what else could you do with the blockchain? And that leads to all these other use cases that people are talking about now. And that's what we call web three. So we use the term web three, all of the basically use cases of the blockchain, which includes digital money, but the other 100 ideas that people are pursuing today, right, and how much of your investment and bullishness with respect to web three is predicated on the expectation that bitcoin will endure? Bitcoin specifically, as if not the only cryptocurrency and store of value? A major one. Yeah, so bitcoin is really unusual, and it goes back to this original kind of founding myth reality, which is very unusual, which is it's not changing, right? If you just think about technology, like we have this adage in the valley, it's like technology is like bananas. New technology becomes obsolete almost immediately, right? You see this all the time now. I ship a new whatever, this, that video game player, whatever, it's like a year later. It's like last year's news. It's the previous iPhone model, right? It's the great glory of the tech industry. It's like, we keep pushing this stuff forward, we keep doing new things. And so there's a museum in san jose called the museum of whatever, computer museum, computer history museum is it's fun to go to, but every single thing in it is something nobody uses anymore because they're all obsolete. And so any other area of technology you'd say bitcoin comes out, the founder vanishes. It doesn't change. It's essentially unchanged. They made a little tinkering around it, but it's essentially unchanged since 2009. It's now 13 years old. It's obviously going to be completely obsolete. And by the way, lots of other people have developed lots of new blockchains and lots of new forms of cryptocurrency and lots of new web, three things and so forth along the way. And so shouldn't it just kind of fade away? We honor it as the forerunner of what we have, but we're building better systems now. The thing that's so unusual about it on this topic is that it is digital gold, right? And so it's sort of one and only, like, real foundational, fundamental use cases, store of value, and basically, it's like, okay, it's digital gold. If you were going to basically write a spec for digital gold, what would you say would be the main thing you would need from it? And the main thing you would need from it is that it doesn't change. Right. So this is like the one application of technology I've ever seen, whereas it's actually a benefit, right? It's a part of the bull case for it that it doesn't change. In particular, if the amount of it doesn't change, you're not going to find much more of it. Suddenly. Yeah, that's right. The amount of it is fixed. The amount of it is fixed. But even more than that, it's like bitcoin, ten years. It's the only thing I know of where ten years from now, 20 years from now, 100 years from now, it's going to be running essentially the same way that it runs today. And it's just literally because satoshi is not here to change it and nobody else is going to change it, and it's honest track. But if it's literally digital gold, if it's like a permanent store of value, then all of a sudden you've taken what historically be a weakness, turned it into a strength. My best guess would be that bitcoin is sort of digital gold. My best guess, though, also would be that it's new systems being developed today or over the next ten years that will basically take all the other use cases. And and again, it's the same thing. Bitcoin is not changing. Bitcoin can't actually do all the other use cases, and so it's, it's going to have to be new developments. And so we're, we're, we're in the and camp, you know, this has become a very you know, this is, you know, this is, this is a full fledged religious war at this point. So there are very strong believers with a great deal of kind of force and energy on all sides of this. And so there's definitely schisms on this, but we're kind of a big tent kind of thing, and we're making all the bets, including bitcoin. But you're betting that bitcoin doesn't become the digital currency. You're distinguishing it as a store of value from it being an efficient and scalable digital dollar. Essentially, yeah. So it can't in its current form, it can't it can't be the digital dollar. The transaction processing system of bitcoin, the way the blockchain works, it's not built for that level of scale and performance. Right. And you can see that, by the way, because there's a cost associated with transactions. There's so called mining fees and the cost to clear a transaction through bitcoin. I don't know what it is today, but it's non trivial. And then there's long delays, and so it's just not going to be able to do that. And that's today, right? If it actually takes on even like a quarter of the global economy, it's going to be many quarters of magnitude bigger than it is today, and it's not going to be able to handle it. This is that this is the downside of Satoshi no longer being with us, is it's not adapting to be able. On earth two, satoshi stayed involved and bitcoin became everything. But that's not what's happened in Earth One. Now, look, having said that, there are smart entrepreneurs that are developing layers on top of bitcoin where they're going to try to make that happen. Jack Dorsey, who's a smart guy, has a whole effort to try to have layers on top of bitcoin to do this kind of thing. There are other people trying to do it. So there are people trying to kind of augment bitcoin bitcoin and kind of turbocharge it in different ways. Maybe some of those efforts will work, or maybe it will just be brand new systems. There's also, by the way, a big transition, a big technology transition underway. The original way bitcoin worked with so called proof of work, where you solve all these math problems to sort of validate that you own what you own. The way the underlying transaction processing engine works, there's sort of an overall architecture change being kind of proposed in the industry, which is to what's called proof of stake, which is sort of a much less energy, sort of aggressive thing if Ethereum is switching from proof of work to proof of proof of stake. And so if proof of stake works, like, it's one of these phase shifts that happens in the industry where just things work differently. On the other side, bitcoin would remain proof of work because it kind of can't change. But you may have these new systems that just fundamentally work both different and much better for high scale transaction processing. That's a TBD, but we're pretty confident that that has a good chance of succeeding. So I guess now I want to kind of pivot to, if not politics, politics adjacent, larger societal concerns where we are at this moment in history, how technology is coming to the rescue or failing to come to the rescue. And I guess as a starting point to this chapter in the conversation, I would reference the essay you wrote early in COVID titled It's Time to Build, which was really the technologists and entrepreneurs and in your case, VC's. Heart cry over just the misspent energy of the moment and just how much so many of us at the time were feeling that we really needed to seize this opportunity to shore up our society against the forces of fragmentation. And it really was an opportunity to get our heads straight. And I don't know how you feel about this, but I think looking back on it, obviously we're still in Copenhand to some degree, but I look back on it as a kind of failed dress rehearsal for something much worse. I think there will be things that are much worse. And I'm not drawing the comforting lesson that I wish I could draw from our performance over these last couple of years, that we've learned many lessons. Even if we've made some obvious mistakes, we understand what those mistakes were, and we're not going to make those mistakes again. I just feel like we're all waking up from a bad dream, and in the waking state, some of the horrible creatures of the dream are still with us and that we're not all that much wiser. Take me back to the moment you wrote that essay and give me your your view of the last couple of years. What did COVID do to us? Yeah, so that essay was a primal scream. I think it probably comes across that way. And I can't say that in the essay, it was at a very specific moment. It was when COVID was hitting in New York City and we all thought COVID was going to hit his heart everywhere. Unfortunately, it didn't. But in retrospect, there were specific moments like Italy was a catastrophe and then New York City was catastrophe. There were some others, but unfortunately it didn't actually hit the rest of the country the way it hit New York. But at that moment, it seemed like we were all really in for it to the degree to which New York was in for it at that time, which was very catastrophic for people in New York at that moment. Those were the days of just like, constant at whaling, mass ambulance sounds everywhere in New York. And so the mayor of New York, the since departed Bill de Blasio, put out a call and said people with rain ponchos could please donate them to local hospitals for use of surgical gowns. Yes, that inspires confidence in our civil. By the way, is this a family podcast or can I swear. You swear to your heart's content. Jesus. Jesus Christ. Really? Like the civilization of the United States of America, 240 years in or whatever, literally. Like, we're using rain ponchos for surgical gowns in hospitals in New York City. Honestly, like, that's where we've gotten to, you know, we don't you know, we don't have masks, we don't have this, we don't have that, and now we we don't have freaking surgical gowns. So it's like, this is just ridiculous. And so that that sort of thing what I tried to do. At the end of the day. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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 Sam Harris./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK, a few things to announce here. I have an event in Los Angeles on July 11. If you're a supporter of the podcast, you should have already received an email. This is actually the first event for the app. It's the first waking up event. It is at the Wiltern on July 11, and it is with a great Tibetan lama by the name of Mingir Rampagee. And Mingir is a fascinating guy. He's the youngest son of the greatest Zog gen master I ever studied with Tukorgan Ripeche, and I wrote about him in my book Waking Up. So that name might be familiar to some of you. I studied with him in Nepal about 30 years ago and I've never met Minguer. And he's about, I don't know, seven years younger than me. I was in my 20s when I was in Nepal and he was a teenager and he was on retreat for much of that time. He did his first three year retreat when he was, I think, 13, and he was always described as the superstar of the family. I studied with two of his brothers choking Emer and Pache. And Sulkima. And Pache. But I've never met Minguer and really looking forward to it. He has a very interesting story because at some point he started teaching and started running monasteries. I believe he has three monasteries he's running as well as a foundation. But then in 2011, when he was 36, he just disappeared from his monastery in India and spent the next four and a half years wandering around India as a mendicant yogi, living in caves and on the streets and encountering all kinds of hardships. I believe he got very sick and almost died. Anyway, he's written a book about this titled In Love with the World, which I haven't read yet, but I will obviously read it before our event. And we will discuss the book and the nature of mind and the practice of meditation and take your questions. And again, that will be happening at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on July 11, and you can find more information on my website@samharris.org. Events and tickets are selling quickly there, so if you care about that event, I wouldn't wait. And the audio will eventually be released on the podcast. Okay. The waking up app. There have been a few changes we've added Onika's meditations for children, which are great, and there are some meta meditations coming from me as well. Also, we'll soon be giving you the ability to sit in groups, where you can organize a virtual group with your friends or colleagues and sit together either in silence or listening to a guided meditation. And very soon there will be a web based version of the course. You can get more information about all that@wakingup.com. So this podcast is the result of three interviews, and it is organized around a new book from my agent, John Brockman, who edited it. And the book is titled Possible Minds 25 Ways of Looking at AI. And you may have heard me mention John on the podcast before. He's not just a book agent, though. Between him and his wife Katinka Matson and their son Max Brockman, they have a near monopoly on scientific nonfiction. It's really quite impressive. Many of the authors you know and admire steve Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and really most other people in that vein you could name. And many who have been on this podcast are represented by them. But John is also a great connector of people and ideas. He seems to have met every interesting person in both the literary and art worlds since around 1960. And he's run the website Edge for many years, which released its annual question for 20 years and got many interesting people to write essays for that. And there have been many books published on the basis of those essays. He's also put together some great meetings and small conferences. So he's really facilitated dialogue to an unusual degree and at a very high level. And he's written his own books, the Third Culture. And by the late John Brockman. But this new book is another one of his anthologies, and it's organized around a modern response to Norbert Weiner's book, The Human Use of Human Beings. Weiner was a mathematical prodigy and the father of cybernetics, and a contemporary of Alan Turing and John von Neumann and Claude Shannon, and many of the people who were doing foundational work on computation. And Weiner's thoughts on artificial intelligence anticipate many of our modern concerns. Now, I didn't wind up contributing to this book. I had to sit this one out. But I will be speaking with three of the authors who did. The first is George Dyson. George is a historian of technology, and he's the author of Darwin Among the Machines and Touring's Cathedral. My second interview is with Allison Gopnick. Allison is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley. She's a leader in the field of children's learning and development, and her books include The Philosophical Baby. And finally, I'll be speaking with Stewart Russell, who's been on the podcast before. Stewart is a professor of computer science and engineering at UC Berkeley, and he's also the author of the most widely used textbook on AI titled artificial Intelligence a Modern Approach. This is a deep look at the current state and near and perhaps distant future of AI. And now, without further delay, I bring you George Dyson. I am here with George Dyson. George, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Happy to be here. So the occasion for this conversation is the publication of our Friend and Mutual Agents book, possible Minds 25 Ways of Looking at AI. And this was edited by the great John Brockman. I am not in this book. I could not get my act together when John came calling. So unfortunately, I'm not in this very beautiful and arudite book. Previously, you wrote Touring's Cathedral. So you have you've been thinking about computation for quite some time. How do you summarize your intellectual history and what you focused on? Well, my interest yeah. It goes back much further than that. During Cathedral was a recent book. 25 years ago, I was writing a book called Darwin Among the Machines at a time when there actually were no publishers publishing, you know, any general literature about computers except Addison Wesley. So they published it thanks to John. Thing to remember about John and Katinka is a family business. Tinker's father was a literary agent, and John's father, I think, was in the flower merchant business. So they have this very great combination of flowers have to be sold the same day, and books have to last forever. Sort of works really well together. Yeah. And your background is you also have a family background that's relevant here because your father is Freeman Dyson, who many people will be aware is a famous physicist. He got inducted into the Manhattan Project right at the beginning as well. Right. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study. Correct. My sequencing here, first of all, the important thing in my background is not so much my father, but my mother. My mother was a mathematical logician, so she worked very closely with Good Goodall and, you know, new Alan Turing's work in logic very well. And that's where the world of computers came out of. That my father. They both came to America at the same time in 1948. So long the Manhattan Project was long over. My father had nothing to do with it. Oh, okay. He was working for the conventional bombing campaign for the Royal Air Force during the war, but not the Manhattan Project. So your mother so you have deep roots in the related physics and logic and mathematics of information, which has given us this now century of or near century of computation and has transformed everything. It's a fascinating intellectual history because the history of computing is intimately connected with the history of war, specifically code breaking and bomb design. And you did cover this in Turin's Cathedral. You're often described as a historian of technology. Is that correct? Does that label fit well with your true yes, I mean, more a history of people of the people who build the technologies, but somehow the label is historian of technology. I'm not a historian of science. That's also I don't know why that's always it's just sort of a pigeonhole they put you into. But maybe we can walk through this topic by talking about some of the people. There are some fascinating characters here, and the nominal inspiration for this conversation for John's book was his discovery or rediscovery of Norbert Weiner's book, the Human Use of Human Beings. But there were different paths through the history of thinking about information and computation and the prospect of building intelligent machines, and Weiner represented one of them. But there was another branch that became more influential, which was due to Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Maybe, I guess. Who should we start with? Probably Alan Turing at the outset here. How do you think of Alan Turing's contribution to the advent of the computer? Well, it was very profound. Nor Ravini was working in a similar way at almost the same time. So they all sort of came out of this together. Their sort of philosophical grandfather was Leibniz, the German computer scientists and philosophers. They all sort of were disciples of Leibniz and then executed that in different ways. Von Neumann and Weiner worked quite closely together at one time. Turing and Weiner never really did work together, but they were very aware of each other's work. The young Allen touring, which also people forget, he came to America in in 1936. So he was actually in in New Jersey when his great sort of paper on computation was published. So he was there in the same building with von Neumann. He said, here's a bright, and offered offered him a job, which he didn't take. He preferred to go back to England. Yeah, I don't know how to think about that. So just bring your father into the picture here and perhaps your mother, if she knew all these guys as well. Did they know? Von Neumann and Turing and Claude Shannon and Weiner. What of these figures? Do you have some family lore around? Yes and no. They both knew Johnny von Neumann quite well because he was sort of in circulation. My father had met Norbert Weiner, but never worked with him, didn't really know him, and neither of them actually met Alan Turing. But of course, my father came from Cambridge, where Turing had been sort of a fixture. My father said was that when he read Turing's paper, when it came out and he thought like many people, he thought this was sort of the least likely. This was interesting logic, but it would have no great effect on the real world. I think my mother was probably maybe a little more prescient that logic really would change the world. Von Neumann is perhaps the most colorful character here. There seems to be an absolute convergence of opinion that regardless of the fact that he may not have made the greatest contributions in the history of science. He seemed to have just bowled everyone over and given a lasting impression that he was the smartest person they had ever met. Does that ring true in the family as well? Or have estimations of von Neumann's intelligence been exaggerated? No, I don't think that's exaggerated at all. I mean, he was impressively sharp and smart, extremely good memory, phenomenal calculation skills, sort of everything. Plus, he had this his real genius was not entrepreneurship, but just being able to put everything together. His father was an investment banker, so he had no shyness about just asking for money. That was sort of, in some ways, almost his most important contribution was he was the guy who could get the money to do these things that other people simply dreamed of, but he got them done and he hired the right people. Sort of like the orchestra conductor who get the best violin player and put them all together. Yeah, these stories are I think I've referenced them occasionally on the podcast, but it's astounding to just read this record because you have really the greatest physicists and mathematicians of the time all gossiping essentially, about this one figure, who certainly Edward Teller was of this opinion. And I think there's a quote from him somewhere which says that if we ever evolve into a master race of super intelligent humans, it will recognize that von Neumann was the prefiguring example. This is how we will appear when we are fundamentally different from what we are now. And Vigner and other physicists seem to concur the stories about him are these two measures of intelligence, both memory and processing speed. You grab both of those knobs and turn them up to eleven, and that just seems to be the impression you make on everyone, that you're just a different sort of mind. Yeah. In other ways it's a great tragedy because he was doing really good work in, you know, pure mathematics and logic and game theory, quantum mechanics and those kinds of things, and then got completely distracted by the weapons and the computers. Never, never really got back to any real science, and then died young like Alan Turing. The very same thing. So we sort of lost these two brilliant minds who not only died young, but sort of professionally died very early because they got sucked into the war, never came back. Yeah, there was an ethical split there because Norbert Weiner, who was again part of this conversation fairly early, I think it was 47, published a piece in the Atlantic, more or less vowing never to let his intellectual property have any point of contact with military efforts. And so at the time, it was all very fraught seen that physics and mathematics was the engine of destruction. However ethically purposed, obviously there's a place to stand where the Manhattan Project looks like a very good thing that we won the race to fission before the Nazis could get there. But it's an ethically complicated time, certainly. Yes. And that's where Norbert Weiner worked very intensively and effectively for the military in both World War I. He was at the proving ground in World War I and World War II, but he worked on anti aircraft defense. And what people forget was that it was pretty far along at Los Alamos when we knew, when we learned that the Germans were not actually building nuclear weapons. And at that point, people like Norbert Weiner wanted nothing more to do with it, and particularly Norbert Weiner wanted nothing to do with the hydrogen bomb. There was no military justification for hydrogen bomb. The only use of those weapons still today, it's against genocide against civilians. They have no military use. Do you recall the history on the German side? I know there is a story about Heisenberg's involvement in the German bomb effort, but I can't remember if rumors of his having intentionally slowed that or not are in fact, true. Well, that's a whole other subject. We stay away from not getting to that, and I'm not the expert on that. But what you know, what little I do know is that it became known at Los Alamos late, later in the project that that there really was no German threat yet. Then the decision was made to keep working on it. There were a few people right now, there's one name. I don't remember who it was. One or two physicists actually quit work when they learned that the German program was not a real threat, but most people chose to keep working on it. That was a very moral decision. Yeah. How do you view it? Do you view it as a straightforward good one way or the other, or how would you have navigated that? And if you have any extremely complicated, very complex I mean, of the people you were talking about, the Martians, these sort of extraterrestrial Hungarians, they all kept working on the weapons, except Leo Salad, who actually he was at Chicago. He then sort of communicated from Los Alamos. Groves wanted to have him put in jail, and he circulated a petition I think it was signed by 67 physicists from Chicago to not use the weapon against the civilians of Japan, to at least give a demonstration against an unpopulated target. And that petition never even reached the president. It was sort of embargoed. I've never understood why a demonstration wasn't a more obvious option. I mean, it was the fear that it it wouldn't work. And yes, because they didn't know, and and they had only a very few weapons at that time, two or three. There were a lot of but that's, again, a story that's still to be figured out, and I think the people like von Neumann carried a lot of that to the grave with them. But Edward Teller's answer to the Solar petition was, I'd love to sign your petition, but I think his exact words were, the things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of fiddling with politics will save our souls. That's pretty much an exact quote. Yeah. So I think Teller was first. Teller was another one of these Hungarian mutants, along with von Neumann, and the two of them really inspired the continued progress past a fission weapon and on to a fusion one, and computation was an absolutely necessary condition of that progress. So the story of the birth of the computer is largely, or at least the growth of our power in building computers is largely the story of the imperative that we felt to build the age bomb. Right. And what's weird is that we're sort of stuck with it. Like it's. You know, for 60 years, we've been stuck with this computational architecture that was developed for this very particular problems that do numerical hydrodynamics to to solve this hydrogen bomb question, to to know the the question was, would the Russians they knew the Russians were working on it because von Neumann had worked intimately with Klaus Fuchs. It turned out to be a Russian spy. So they knew the Russians sort of knew everything. They did. But the question was, was it possible? And you needed computers to figure that out, and they got the computer working, and then now, 67 years later, our computers are still exact copies of that particular machine they built to do that job. It's a very none of those people would I think they would find it incomprehensible if they if they came back today and saw that, you know, we hadn't really made any architectural improvements. Is this a controversial position at all in computer circles, or is this acknowledged that the von Neumann architecture, I think it is still called, we got stuck in this legacy paradigm, which is by no means necessarily the best for building computers. Yeah. No, they knew it wasn't. Even by the time Alan Turing came to Princeton, he was working on completely different kinds of computation. He was already sort of bored with the Turing machine. He was interested in much more interesting sort of nondeterministic machines. And the same with von Neumann. Long before that project was finished, he was thinking about other things. What's interesting about von Neumann is he only has one patent, and the one patent he took out was for a completely non von Neumann computer that IBM bought from him for $50,000. Another strange story that hasn't quite, I think, been figured out. Presumably, that was when $50,000 really meant something was an enormous amount of money, just a huge amount of money. They all wanted to build different kinds of computers, and if they had lived, and I think they would have. In your contribution to this book, you talk about the prospect of analog versus digital computing. Make that intelligible to the non computer scientist. Yes. So there are really two very different kinds of computers. Again, back to touring it in sort of a mathematical sense. There are continuous functions that vary continuously, which is sort of how we perceive time or the frequency of sound or those sorts of things. And then there are discrete functions of sort of ones and zeros and bits that took over the world. And Alan Turing gave this very brilliant proof of what you could do with a purely digital machine. But both Alan Turing and von Neumann were almost ends their lives obsessed with the fact that nature doesn't do this. Nature does this in our genetic systems. We use digital coding because digital coding is, as Shannon showed us, is so good at error correction. But continuous functions and analog computing are better for control. All control systems in nature, all nervous systems, the human brain, the brain of a fruit fly, the brain of a mouse, those are all analog computers, not digital. There's no digital code in the brain. And von Neumann wrote a whole book about that that people have misunderstood. I guess you could say that whether or not a neuron fire is a digital signal, but then the analog component is downstream of that, just the different synaptic weights. Right. But there's no code with a logical meaning. The complexity is not in the code. It's in the topology and the connections of the network. Everybody knew that you could take a part of brain. You don't find any sort of digital code. Now, we're sort of obsessed with this idea of algorithms, which is what Alan Turing gave us. But there are no algorithms in a nervous system or a brain. That's a much, much sort of higher level function that comes later. Well, so you introduced another personality here and a concept. So let's just do a potted bio. And Claude Shannon and this notion that digitizing information was somehow of value with respect to error correction. Yes, what Claude Shannon's great contribution was sort of modern information theory, which you can make a very good case. He actually took those ideas from Norbert Weiner, who was explaining them to him during the war. But it was Shannon who published a great manifesto on that, proving that you can sort of communicate with reliable accuracy, given any arbitrary amount of noise by using digital coding, and that none of our computers would work without that. The fact that basically your computer is a communication device and has to communicate these hugely complicated states from one fraction of a microsecond to the next billions of times a second. And the fact that we do that perfectly is due to Shannon's theory and his model of how. How can you do that in an accurate way? Is there a way to make that intuitively understandable why that would be so? I mean, what what I picture is like cogs in a gear, where it's like you're either all in one slot or you're all out of it. And so any looseness of fit keeps reverting back to you fall back into the well of the gear or you slip out of it. Whereas it's something that's truly continuous. That is to say, analog admits of errors that are undetectable because you're kind of sliding off a more continuous smoother surface. Do you have that's a very good way to explain it. Now it has this fatal flaw that you sort of there's always a price for everything, so you can get this perfect digital accuracy where you can make sure that every bit, billions of bits and every bit is in the right place. Your software will work. But the fatal flaw is that if for some reason a bit isn't in the right place, then the whole machine grinds to a halt, whereas the analog machine will keep going. It's much more robust against failure. So are you in touch with people who are pursuing this other line of building intelligent machines now? What does analog computation look like circa 2019? Well, it's coming at us from in two directions. There's bottom up and there's sort of top down. And the bottom up is actually extremely interesting. And I'm professionally not a computer scientist, I'm a historian. I look at the past, but occasionally I get dragged into a meeting a couple of years ago that was actually held at intel. You'll have a meeting like that and they like the voice of a historian there, so I get to go. And this was an entire meeting of people working on building analog chips from the bottom up, using the same technology we use to build digital computers, but to build completely different kinds of chips that actually do analog processing on them. And that's extremely exciting. I think it's going to change the world the same way the microprocessor changed the world. We're sort of at the stage where like we were when we had the first four bit calculator you could buy and then suddenly somebody figured out how to play a game with it, the whole thing happened. So that's from the bottom up, some of these chips are going to do very interesting things like voice recognition or smell things like that. Of course, the big driver sort of killer app is drones, which is sort of the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb. That's what's driving this stuff. And self driving cars and cell phones and then from the top down is a whole another thing. And that's the part where I think we're sort of missing something that if you look at the sort of internet as a whole, or the whole computational ecosystem, particularly on the commercial side, enormous amount of the interesting computing we're doing now is back to analog computing where we're competing with continuous functions. It's pulse frequency coded. Something like Facebook or YouTube doesn't care the file that somebody clicks on, they don't care what the code is, they just care. The meaning is in the frequency that it's connected to very much the same way a brain or a nervous system works. So if you look at these large companies, facebook or Google or something, actually they're large analog computers. Digital is not replaced, but another layer is growing on top of it. The same way that after World War II we had all these analog vacuum tubes and the oddballs like Alan Turing and von Neumann and even Nor Rainer figured out how to use the analog components to build digital computers. And that was the digital revolution. But now we're sort of in the bright, in the midst of another revolution where we are taking all this digital hardware and using it to build analog systems, but somehow people don't want to talk about that. Analog is still sort of seen as this archaic thing. I believe differently. In what sense is an analog system supervening on the digital infrastructure? Are there other examples that can make it more vivid for people? Yes, analog is much better. Like nature uses analog for control systems. So you take an example, like an obvious one would be Google Maps with live traffic. So you have all these cars driving around and people have their digital cell phone in the car and you sort of have this deal with Google, whereas Google will tell you what the traffic is doing and the optimum path if you tell Google how fast where you are and how fast you're moving. And that becomes an analog computer or an analog system where there is no digital model of all the traffic in San Francisco, the actual system is its own model. That sort of anointed definition of an organism or a complex system that it constitutes its own simplest behavioral description. There is no trying to formally describe what's going on. Makes it more complicated, not less. There's no way to simplify that whole system except the system itself. So you're using Facebook is very much the same way it would be impossible to build. You could build a digital model maybe of social life in a high school, but if you try to do social life and anything large, it becomes just collapses under its own complexity. So you just give everybody a copy of Facebook, which is a reasonably simple piece of code that lives on their mobile device, and suddenly you have a full scale model of the actual thing itself. The social graph is the social graph. And that's what's huge transition we've sort of, I think is at the root of some of the unease people are feeling about some of these particular companies is that suddenly used to be google was someplace where you would go to look something up. And now it really effectively is becoming what people think. And the big fears that something like Facebook becomes what your friends are and that can be good or bad, but it's a real just in an observational sense. It's something that's happening. So. What most concerns you about how technology is evolving at this point? Well, I wear different hats. There my other huge part. Most of my life was spent as a boat builder, and still I'm right here in the middle of a kayak building workshop and want nothing to do with computer. That's really why I started studying them and writing about them, because I was not against them, but quite suspicious. The big thing about artificial intelligence AI, it's not a threat, but the threat is that not that machines become more intelligent, but that people become less intelligent. So I spent a lot of time out in the wild with no computers at all, live in a treehouse for three years, and you can lose that sort of natural intelligence, I think, as a species, reasonably quickly if we're not careful. So that that's what worries me. I mean, obviously, the machines are clearly taking over there's no, if you look at the just the span of my life, from when von Neumann built that one computer to where we now almost biological growth of this technology. So as a member of Living Things, it's something to be concerned about. Do you know David Krakauer from the Santa Fe Institute? Yes, I don't know him, but I've met him and talked to him. Yeah, because he has a wrap on this very point where he distinguishes between I think his phrasing is cognitively competitive and cognitively cooperative technology. So there are forms of technology that compete with our intelligence on some level, and insofar as we outsource our cognition to them, we get less and less competent. And then there are other forms of technology where we actually become better, even in the absence of the technology. And so, unfortunately, the only example of the latter that I can remember is the one he used on the podcast was the Abacus, which apparently, if you learn how to use an advocates, well, you internalize it and you can do calculations you couldn't otherwise do in your head in the absence, even of the physical advocates. Whereas if you're relying on a pocket calculator or your phone or for arithmetic or you're relying on GPS, you're eroding whatever ability you had in those areas. So if we get our act together and all of this begins to move in a better direction or something like an optimal direction, what what does that look like to you? If I told you 50 years from now, we arrived at something just far better than any of us were expecting with respect to this marriage of increasingly powerful technology with some regime that conserves our deepest values. How do you imagine that looking? Well, yeah, it's certainly possible, and I guess that's where I would be slightly optimistic in that my knowledge of human culture goes way back and we grew up as a species. And speaking of just all humanity, most of our history was among animals who were bigger and more powerful than we were and things that we completely didn't understand. And we sort of made up our not religions, but just views of the world that we couldn't control everything. We had to live with it. And I think in a strange way, we're kind of returning to that childhood of the species in a way that we're building these systems that we no longer have any control over and we, in fact, no longer even have any real understanding of. So we're sort of, in some ways, back to that world that we originally were quite comfortable with, where we're at, the power of things that we don't understand, sort of megafauna. And I think that could be a good thing, it could be a bad thing. I don't know, but it doesn't surprise me. And personally, I'm interested if you take back why we're here, which is John's book, almost everyone in that book is talking about domesticated artificial intelligence. I mean, they're talking about commercial systems, products that you can buy, things like that. Personally, I'm sort of a naturalist, and I'm interested in wild AI, what evolves completely in the wild, out of human control completely. And that's a very interesting part of the whole sphere that doesn't get looked at that much. The focus now is so much on marketable captive AI, self driving cars, things like that. But it's the wild stuff that to me, that's like, I'm not I'm not afraid of bad AI. But I'm afraid. I'm very afraid of good AI. The kind of AI where some ethics board decides what's good and what's bad. I don't think that's what's going to be really important. But don't you see the possibility that so what we're talking about here is increasingly powerful AI. So increasingly competent AI. But those of us who are worried about the prospect of building what's now called AGI artificial general intelligence that proves bad is just based on the assumption that there are many more ways to build AGI that is not ultimately aligned with our interests than there are ways to build it perfectly aligned with our interests. Which is to say, we could build the megafauna that tramples us perhaps more easily than we could build the megafauna that lives side by side with us in a durably, benign way. You don't share that concern? No, I think that's extremely foolish and misguided to think that we can I mean, sort of by definition, real AI. You won't have any control over. I mean, this sort of idea that, oh, we, we there's some that's again, why I think there's this enormous mistake that thinking it's all based on algorithms. I mean, real AI won't be based on algorithms. So there's this misconception that happened back to when they built those first computers that they needed programmers to run. So this view is that while the programmers are in control, but if you have non algorithmic, there is no program by definition, you don't control it. And to expect control is absolutely foolish. But I think it's much better to be realistic and assume that you won't have control. So then why isn't your bias here one of the true council of fear, which says we shouldn't be building machines more powerful than we are? Well, we probably shouldn't, but we are. I mean, the fact is we've done it. It's not something that we're thinking about, it's something we've been doing for a long time and it's probably not going to stop. And then the point is to be realistic about and maybe optimistic that humans have not been the best at controlling the world and something else could well be better. But this illusion that we are going to program artificial intelligence is, I think, provably wrong. I mean, Alan Turing would have proved that wrong. That was how he got into the whole thing in the beginning, was proving this statement called the in Shining Problem. Whether by any systematic way to look at a string of code and predict what it's going to do, you can't. It baffles me that people don't sort of somehow we've been so brainwashed by this. The digital revolution was so successful. It's amazing how it has sort of clouded everyone's thinking. They don't think of if you talk to biologists, of course, they know that very well. People who actually work with brains of frogs or mice, they know it's not digital. Why people think more intelligent things would be digital. Again, it's sort of baffling. How did that sort of take over the world, that thought? Yeah. It does seem, though, that if you think the development of truly intelligent machines is synonymous with machines, that not only can we not control, but we on some level can't form a reasonable expectation of what they will be inclined to do. There's the assumption that there's some way to launch this process that is either provably benign in advance or so. I'm looking at the book now, and the person there who I think has thought the most about this is Stuart Russell, and he's just trying to think of a way in which AI can be developed where its master value is to continually understand in a deeper and more accurate way what we want. Right, so, and what we want can obviously change, and it can change in dialogue with this now superintelligent machine, but its value system is in some way durably anchored to our own because its concern is to get our situation the way we want it. Right. But all the most terrible things that have ever happened in the world happened because somebody wanted them. There's no safety in that. I admire Stuart Russell, but we disagree on this sort of provably good AI. But I guess at least what you're doing there is collapsing it down to one fear rather than the other. The fear that provably benign AI or provably obedient AI could be used by bad people toward bad ends. That's obviously a fear. But the greater fear that many of us worry about is that developing AGI in the first place can't be provably benign and we will find ourselves in relationship to something far more powerful than ourselves that doesn't really care about our well being in the end. Right. And that's again, sort of the world we used to live in and I think we can make ourselves reasonably comfortable there, but we no longer become the classic religious view. There are humans and there's God and there's only nothing but angels in between. That can change nothing but angels and devils in between now. Right. North Weiner sort of the last thing he published before well, we have to publish after he died. But I mean, there's a line in there which I think gets it right, that the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our own intelligence. Not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be weighted upon by our robot slaves. Those are the two sort of paths so many people want. Some of the cars are going to drive us around and be our slaves. It's probably not going to happen that way. On that dire note. It's not a dire note. I mean, it could be a good thing. We've been the sort of chief species for a long time and it could be time for something else, but at least be realistic about it. Don't have this sort of childish view that everything's going to be obedient to us. That hasn't worked. And I think it was did a lot of harm to the world that we had that view. Again, one of the signs of any real artificial intelligence would immediately be intelligent enough not to reveal its existence to us. That would be the first smart thing it would do, would be not reveal itself. The fact that AI has not revealed itself to me is no, that's zero evidence that it doesn't exist. I would take it the other way that if it existed, I would expect it not to reveal itself unless it's so much more powerful than we are that it perceives no cost and it reveals itself by merely steamrolling over us. Well, there would be a cost. I think it's sort of sort of faith is better than proof. You can see where I'm going with that, but it's not necessarily malevolent. This is likely to be benevolent as malevolent. Okay, so I have a few bonus questions for you, George. These can be short form. If you had one piece of advice for someone who wants to succeed in your field and you can describe that field however you like, what would it be? Okay, well, I'm a historian when I became a boat builder. And so the advice in all those fields is just specialize and they find something and become obsessed with it. I became obsessed with the kayaks that the Russians adopted when they came to Alaska. And then I became obsessed with how computing really happened. And if you are obsessed with one little thing like that, you immediately become you can very quickly know more than anybody else, and that helps to be successful. What, if anything, do you wish you'd done differently in your twenty s? Thirty s or forty s? I mean, you can't you can't replay that tape. I wish well, I can be very clear about that. I wish in my twenty s I had gone to the Aleutian Islands earlier while while more of the old time kayak builders were still alive and and kind of interviewed and learned from them and then very much the same in my 30. All these projects. I did go find the surviving Project Orion people and technicians and physicists and interviewed them. But I should have done that earlier. And the same with computing. In my forty s I could have interviewed a lot more people who really were there at that important time. I sort of caught them, but almost too late. And I wish I had done that sooner. Ten years from now. What do you think you'll regret doing too much of or too little of at this point in your life? Probably regret not getting out more up the coast again, which is what I'm trying to do. It's what I'm working very diligently at. But I keep getting distracted. You got to get off the podcast and get into the kayak. Yeah, we could be doing this from Orca lab. They have a good internet connection. That's the beautiful thing that you can do this. The other thing I would say is a side, but I grew up since a young teenager in Canada where the country was united by Radio Canada. People didn't get newspapers, but everybody listened to one radio channel. In a way, podcasts are again back to that past where we're all listening to the radio again. And I think it's a great thing. What negative experience, one you would not wish to repeat, has most profoundly changed you for the better. I very nearly choked to death. Literally the only time I've had a true near death experience. Seeing the tunnel of light and reliving my whole life and not only thinking about my daughter and other profound things, but thinking how stupid this was. This guy who had kayak to Alaska six times with no life jacket, dies in a restaurant on Columbus Avenue in New York, and John Brockman saved my life, ran out and came back with a New York City off duty fireman who literally saved my life. Wow. I'm so glad I asked that question. I had no idea of that story. Learn Heimlich maneuver dr. Heimlich really did something great for the world. Fascinating. We may have touched this in a way, but maybe there's another side to this. What most worries you about our collective future? Yes, kind of what I said, that we lose our we lose all these skills and intelligences that we've built up over such a long period of time. The ability to survive in the wilderness and understand animals and respect them. I think that's a very sad thing, that we're losing that and, of course, and losing the wildlife itself. If you could solve just one mystery as a scientist or historian or journalist, however you want to come at it, what would it be? One mystery? Well, one of them would be one. We just talked about cetacean communication, what's really going on with these whales communicating in the ocean. That's something I think we could solve, but we're not looking at it in the right way. If you could resurrect just one person from history and put them in our world today and give them the benefit of a modern education, who would you bring back? Probably most of the people I'm interested in. History sort of had extremely good education. You're talking about john von Neumann and Alan Turin. You're right. Yeah. And live notes. I mean, he was very well lately. The character in my project I've been working on lately was kind of awful, but fascinating was Peter the Great. He was so obsessed with science and things like that. So I think to have brought him, if he could come back and it might be a very dangerous thing, but he sort of wanted to learn so much and was again preoccupied by all these terrible things and disasters that were going on at the time. What are you doing on Peter the Great? I've been writing this very strange book where it kind of starts with him and Leibniz. They go to the hot springs together, and they basically stop drinking alcohol for a week. And Leibniz convinces him wants him to support building digital computers, but he's not interested. Computer thing failed. But what Leibniz did convince him was to launch a voyage to America. So that's how the Russians came to Alaska, became the Bearing Turico voyage. But it all starts in this hot springs where they can't drink for a week. So they're just drinking mineral water and talking. There is a great biography on Peter To the Great, isn't there? Is there one that you recommend? Several. I wouldn't know which one to recommend, but again, he's both. Why he's peter to grade. Because he's been well studied. His relationship with Liveness fascinates me, and there's just a lot there we don't know. But kind of amazing how this sort of obscure mathematician becomes very close to this great leader of a huge part of the world. Okay, last question. The Jurassic Park question. If we are ever in a position to recreate the trex, should we do it? I would say yes. But this comes up as a much more real question. With the woolly mammoths and these other animals, the stellar sea cow. There's another one we could maybe resurrect. Yeah, I've had these arguments with Stewart Brand at George Church who are realistic about, could we do it? I would say yes. Don't expect it to work, but certainly worth trying. What are their biases? Do Stuart and George say we should or shouldn't do this? Yeah, if you haven't talked to them, definitely. That would be a great program to go to that debate. The question more is, if you can recreate the animal, does that recreate the species? One of the things they're working on it, I think, trying to build a park in Kamchatka or somewhere over there in Siberia so that if you did recreate the wooly mammoth, they would have an environment to go live in. So to me, that's actually the payoff. The payoff to recreating the wooly mammoth is that would force us to create a better environment, same as we did. Buffalo are coming back and we should bring the antelope back. It's sort of the American cattle industry that sort of wrecked the great central heart of America that could easily come back into the grasslands it once was. Well, listen, George, it's been fascinating. Thank you for your contribution to this book and thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. It's a very interesting book. There's short chapters which just makes it very easy. Yeah, it's a sign of the times, but a welcome one. I am here with Alison Gopnik. Alison, thank you for coming on the podcast. Glad to be here. So we are the the occasion of our conversation is the release of John Brockman's book possible Minds 25 Ways of Looking at AI. And I'm sure there'll be other topics we might want to touch, but as this is our jumping off point, first give me your background. How would you summarize your intellectual interests at this point? Well, I began my career as a philosopher and I'm still half appointed in philosophy at Berkeley. But for 30 years or so, more than that, I guess now I've been looking at young children's development and learning to really answer some of these big philosophical questions. Specifically, the thing that I'm most interested in is how do we come to have an accurate view of the world around us when the information we get from the world seems to be so concrete in particular and so detached from the reality of the world around us? And that's a problem that people in philosophy of science raise. It's a problem that people in machine learning raise. And I think it's a problem that you can explore particularly well by looking at young kids who, after all, are the people who we know in the universe who are best at solving that particular problem. And for the past 20 years or so, I've been doing that in the context of thinking about computational models, of how that kind of learning about the world is possible for anybody, whether it's a scientist or an artificial computer or computational system or again, the best example we have, which is young children. Right. Well, we'll get into the difference between how children learn and how our machines do, or at least our current machines do. But just a little more on your background. You did your PhD in philosophy or in psychology? I actually did my first degree, my BA. Honors philosophy, and then I went to Oxford to actually wanting to do both philosophy and psychology. I worked with Jerome Bruner in psychology, and I spent a lot of time with the people in philosophy. And my joke about this is that after a year or two in Oxford, I realized that there was one of two communities that I could spend the rest of my life with. One community was of completely disinterested seekers after truth who wanted to find out about the way the world really was more than anything else. And the other community was somewhat spoiled, narcissistic, egocentric creatures who needed to be taken care of by women all the time. And since the first community was the babies and the second community was the philosophers, I'd be better off spending the rest of my life hanging out with the babies. Right? That's a little unfair to the philosophers, but it does make the general point, which is that I think a lot of these big philosophical questions can be really well answered by looking at a very neglected group in some ways, namely babies and young children. I PhD in the end in experimental psychology with Jerome Bruner, and then I was in Toronto for a little while and then came to Berkeley, where, as I say, I'm in the psychology department but also affiliated in philosophy. And I've done a lot of collaborations with people doing computational modeling at the same time. So I really think of myself as being a cognitive scientist in the sense that cognitive science puts together ideas about computation, ideas about psychology, and ideas about philosophy. Yeah, well, if you're familiar with me at all, you'll understand that I don't respect the boundaries between these disciplines really at all. I think that it's just interesting how someone comes to a specific question. But whether you're doing cognitive science or neuroscience or psychology or philosophy of mind, this can change from sentence to sentence or it's just really depends on what building in a university campus you're standing in. Well, I think I've tried and I think to some extent succeeded in actually doing that in my entire career. So I publish in philosophy books and collaborate with philosophers. I had a wonderful project where we had half philosophers who were looking at causality, people like Buckleymore and James Woodward and Chris Hitchcock, and then half developmental psychologists and computational cognitive scientists. So people like people like me. Like Josh Tennenbaum at MIT, like Tom Griffiths. And that was an incredibly powerful and successful interaction. And the truth is, I think one of my side interests is David Hume. And if you look at people like David Hume or Barkley or Descartes or the great philosophers of the past, they certainly wouldn't have seen boundaries between the philosophy that they were doing and psychology and empirical science. Let's start with the AI. Question and then get into children and other areas of common interest. So perhaps you want to summarize how you contributed to this volume and your angle of attack on this really resurgent interest in artificial intelligence. It was this period where it kind of all went to sleep. And I remember being blindsided by it, just thinking, well, AI. Hadn't really panned out. And then all of a sudden, AI. Was everywhere. How have you come to this question? Well, as I say, we've been doing work looking at computational modeling and cognitive science for a long time. And I think that's right. For a long time, even though there was really interesting theoretical work going on about how we could represent the kinds of knowledge that we have as human beings computationally, it didn't translate very well into actual systems that could actually go out and do things more effectively. And then what happened, interestingly, in this new AI. Spring wasn't really that there was some great new killer, app new idea about how the mind worked. Instead, what happened was that some ideas that had been around for a long time, since the 80s basically these ideas about neural networks and in some ways, much older ideas about associative networks. For example, suddenly when you had a whole lot of data the way you do with the internet. And when you also had a whole lot of compute power with good old Moore's law running through running through its cycles, those ideas became very practical. So that you could actually take a giant data set of all the images that had been put on the net, for example, and train that data set to discriminate between images. Or you could take the giant data sets of all the translations of French and English on the net, and you could use that to actually design a translation program. Or you could have something like alpha something like alpha zero that could just play millions and millions and millions of games of chess against itself, and then you could use that data set to figure out how to play chess. So the real change was not so much a kind of conceptual change about how we thought about the mind. It was this change in the capacities of computers. And I think to the surprise of everybody, including the people who were including the people who had designed the systems in the first place, it turned out that those ideas really could scale. And the big problem with computational cognitive science has always been not so much that finding good computational models for the mind, although that's a problem, but finding ones that could do more than just solve toy problems, ones that could deal with the complexity of real world kinds of knowledge. And I think it was surprising and kind of wonderful that these learning systems could actually turn out to work at a broad scale. And the other thing that, of course, was interesting was that not just in the history of AI, but in the history of philosophy, there's been this constant kind of pingponging back and forth between two ways to solve this big problem of knowledge, this big problem of how we can ever understand the world around us. And a way I like to put it is here's the problem. We seem to have all this abstract, very structured knowledge of the world around us. We seem to know a lot about the world and we can use that knowledge to make predictions and change the world. And yet it looks as if all that reaches us from the world are these patterns of photons at the back of our eyes and disturbances of air at our ears. And the question is always, how could you resolve that conundrum? And one way going back to Plato and Aristotle has been to say, well, a whole lot of it is built in in the first place, we don't actually have to learn that abstract structure. It's just there. Maybe it evolved. Maybe if you're Plato, it was in a past life. And then the other approach, going all the way back to Aristotle has been to say, well, if you just have enough data, if you just had enough stuff to learn, then you could develop this kind of abstract knowledge of the world. And again, going back to Plato and Aristotle, we kind of ping pong back and forth between those two approaches to trying to solve the problem. And sort of good old fashioned AI said, well, if we just, you know, famously, Roger Shank said, well, if we just had like a summer's worth of interns, we'll figure out all of our knowledge about the world, we'll write it all down and we'll program it into a computer. And that turned out not to be a very successful project. And then the alternative, the kind of neural net idea was, well, if we just have enough data and we have some learning mechanisms, then the learning mechanisms will just be able to pull out the information from the data. And that's kind of where we are now. That's the latest iteration in this back and forth between having building in knowledge and learning the knowledge from the data. Yeah. So what you've done there is you've sketched two different approaches to generating intelligence. One, I guess, could be considered top down and the other bottom up. And what AI has done of late, the great gains we see in image recognition and many other things is born of a process that really is aptly described as bottom up, where you take in an immense amount of data and do. What is essentially a statistical pattern recognition on it. And some of this can be entirely blind and black boxed, such that the humans who have written these programs don't even necessarily know how the machines are doing it. And yet, given enough processing power and enough data, we're now getting results that are human level and beyond for specific tasks. But of course, you make this point in your piece that we know this is not how humans learn, that there is there's some structure undoubtedly given to us by evolution that allows us to generalize on the basis of comparatively small amounts of data. And so this makes what we do non analogous to what our machines are doing. And I guess now both top down and bottom up approaches are being combined in AI. I guess one question I have for you is, is the difference between the way our machines learn and the way human brains learn just of temporary interest to us now? I mean, can you imagine us kind of blowing past this moment and building machines that we just, we know are developing their intelligence in a way that is totally unlike the way we do it biologically? And yet it is successful. It becomes successful on all fronts without our building any analogous process into them. And we just lose sight of the fact that it was ever interesting to compare the ways we do it. There's an effective way to do it in a brute force way, let's say bottom up on every front that will matter to us. Or do you think that there's some problems for which it will be impossible to generate true artificial intelligence unless we have a deeper theory about how biological systems do it? Well, I think we already can see that. So one of the interesting things is that there's this whole really striking revival of interest in AI among people in AI, in cognitive development, for example. And it's because we're starting to come up against the limits of this kind of pattern of having this technique of doing a lot of statistical inference from big data sets. So there are lots of examples, for instance, even if you're thinking about things like image recognition, where if you have something that looks like a German Shepherd, it'll recognize it as a German Shepherd. But if you just have something that to a human just looks like a Mess that has the same textural superficial features as the German Shepherd, it will also recognize it as a German Shepherd. If it sees a car that's suspended in the air and flooded, it will report this is a car parked by the side of the road, and so forth. There's a zillion examples that are like that. In fact, there's a whole kind of area of these adversarial examples where you can show that the machine is not actually making the right decision and it's because it's only paying attention to the sort of superficial features, and in particular, the machines are very bad at making generalizations. So even if you taught, teach AlphaZero how to play chess, and then you said, all right, we're going to just change the rules a little bit. So now the rooks are going to, are going to be able to move diagonally, and you're going to want to capture the queen instead of the king. That kind of difference, which for a human who had learned chess, would be really easy to adjust to for the more recent AI systems, leads to this problem they call catastrophic forgetting, which is having to relearn everything all over again when you get a new data set. So in principle, of course, there's no, in principle, reason why we couldn't have an intelligence that operated completely differently from the way that, say, human children learned. But human children are a demonstration case of the capacities of an intelligence, presumably in some sense a computational intelligence, because that's the best way we have of understanding how human brains work. But that's the best example we have of a system that actually really works to be intelligent. And nothing that we have now is really even in the ballpark of being able to do the same kinds of things that those systems, that system can do. So in principle, it might be that we would figure out some totally different way of being intelligent, but at the moment, the best case we have is a four year old human child. And we're very far from being able to simulate that. I think part of it is if people had just labeled the new techniques by saying statistical inference from large data sets instead of calling it artificial intelligence, I think we would be having a very different kind of conversation. Even though statistical inference from large data sets turns out to be an incredibly powerful tool, more powerful than we might have thought, which should remind people how alarmingly powerful it is in narrow cases. And when you take something like Alpha Zero, what happened there was fairly startling because you have a, an algorithm that is fairly generic in that it, you know, can be taught to play both a game like Go and a game like chess, and presumably other games as well. And we have this history of developing better and better chess engines. And finally the human grandmaster ability was conquered. I forget when that was 90, 97 or so when Gary Casperov lost famously. And ever since, there's just been this incremental growth in the power of these machines. And what AlphaZero did was create again a far more general algorithm, which over the course of 4 hours, taught itself to be better than any chess engine ever. So, I mean, you're taking the totality of human knowledge about this 2000 year old game, all of the engineering talent that went into making this better and better over decades. And here we found an algorithm which turned loose on the problem beat every machine and every person in human history. Essentially, when you extrapolate that kind of process to anything else, we could conceivably care about the recognition of emotion in the human face and voice. Say again, coming at this not in an AGI way where we've cracked the code of what intelligence is on some level and built it from the bottom up, but in a piecemeal way where we take the 100 most interesting cognitive problems and find brute force methods to crack them. It's amazing to consider how quickly a solution can appear. And once it does and this is the point I've always made about so called human level intelligence. For any ability that we actually do find an AI solution, even a narrow one, in the case of chess or arithmetic, once that solution is found, you're never talking about human level intelligence. It's always superhuman. So the moment we get anything like a system that can behave or learn like a four year old child, it won't be at human level even for a second, because you'd have to degrade all of its other abilities that you could cobble together to support it. You wouldn't make it worse than your iPhone as a calculator. Right, so it's already going to be superhuman. Yeah, but I mean, you know, I think there's a question, though, about exactly what different kinds of problems require and how you solve those problems. And I think an idea that is it's pretty clearly there in computer science and neuroscience is that there's trade offs between different kinds of properties of a solution that aren't just because we happen to be biological humans, but are built into the very nature of trying to solve the problem. And in some ways, the most striking thing about the progress of AI all through has been what people sometimes call Marovich's Paradox, which is that actually the things that really impress us as humans are the things that we're not very good at, like doing arithmetic or playing chess. So I think of these sometimes as being like the corridors of nerd mckeesmo so the things that you have to just be have a particular kind of ability that most people don't have and then really train it up to do really well. It turns out those things are things that computers are good at doing. On the other hand, if you might be an example I give is my grandson, who's three, plays something that we call addy chess. His name is Atticus. So how do you play addy chess? Well, the way you play attic chess is you take all the pieces off the board and then you throw them in the wastebasket and then you pick them up out of the waistbasket and you put them more or less in the same place as they were in before. And then you take them all off and throw them in the waste basket again. And it turns out that addy chess is actually a lot harder than Grand Master chess, because addy chess means actually manipulating objects in the real physical world so that you have to figure wherever it is that that piece. Lands in the waste basket. Whatever orientation it is, I can pick it up and perform the motor actions that are necessary to get it on the board. And that turns out to be incredibly difficult. If you go and see any robotics lab, they have to put big walls around the robots to keep them from destroying each other, even trying to do incredibly simple tasks like picking up objects off of a tray. And there's another thing about Eddie chess that makes it really different from what even very, very powerful artificial intelligence can do, which is, as you said, what these new systems can do is you can take what people sometimes call an objective function. You can say to them, look, this is what I want you to do, given this set of input. I want you to produce this set of output, given this set of moves, I want you to get the highest score, or I want you to win at this game. And if you specify that, it turns out that these neural net learning mechanisms are actually remarkably good at solving those problems without a lot of additional information, except just here's a million examples of the input, and here's a million examples of the output. But of course, what human beings are doing all the time is going out and making their own objectives. They're going out and creating new objectives, creating new ideas, creating new goals. Goals that are not the goals that anyone has created before. Even if they might look kind of silly, like playing at a chess and in some way that we really don't understand at all, there's some sense of a kind of progress in those goals that were capable of setting ourselves, goals that were better than the goals that we had before. But again, that's not even kind of in the ballpark. It's not like, oh, if we just made the machines more powerful, then they would be able to, to do those things, too. They would be able to go out and physically manipulate the world, and they would be able to, and they would be able to set novel objectives that's kind of not even in the same, in the same category. And as I say, I think an interesting idea is that there might really be trade offs between some of the kinds of things that humans are really good at. Like, for instance, taking very complicated, high dimensional spaces of solutions, having to think of incredibly wide range of possibilities versus, say, being able to do something really quickly and efficiently when it's well specified. And I think there's reasons to think those things. You might think, well, okay, if you could do the thing that's really well specified and just do that better and better, then you're going to be able to solve the more complicated problem and the less well defined problem. And I think there's actually reasons to believe that that's not true, that there's real trade offs between the kinds of things you need to do to solve those two kinds of problems. Yeah, well, so the paradox you point to is interesting and is a key to how people's expectations will be violated when automation begins to replace human labor to a much greater degree than it has. Because people tend to expect that menial jobs will be automated first, or lower skilled lower, not famously high cognition jobs will be the first to be automated away. But as you point out, many of the things that we find it amazing that human beings can do are easier to automate than the things that virtually any human being can do, which is to say it's easier to play grand master level chess than it is to walk across the room if you're a computer. So your oncologist and your local mathematician are likely to lose their jobs to AI before your plumber will. Just a harder task to move physically into a space and manipulate objects and make decisions across tasks of that sort. So there's a lot that's counterintuitive here, I guess. My sense, however, is that, one, you're not at all skeptical, are you, that intelligence is substrate independent, ultimately, that we could find some way of instantiating humanlike intelligence in a non biological system? Is there something potentially magical about having a computer made of meat from your point of view or not? Well, I think the answer is that we don't really know. Right? So again, the one we have a kind of species of one or maybe species of a couple of examples of systems that can really do this and the ones that we know about are indeed biological. Now, I think the most it's rather striking, and I think maybe not appreciated enough, that this idea that really comes with Turing, the idea of thinking about a human mind as being a computational system, that's just been an incredibly productive idea that's ended up enabling us to make really, really good predictions about many, many things that human beings do. And we don't have another idea that's as good at making predictions or providing explanations for intelligence as that idea. Now, again, maybe it'll turn out that there is something that we're missing that is contributing something important about biology. But I think at the moment, the kind of computational theory of the mind is the best one that's on the table. It's the one that's been most successful just in empirical, scientific terms. So, for instance, when we're looking at young children, if we say, are they doing something like Bayesian inference of structured causal systems? That's a computational idea. We can actually say, okay, well, if they're doing that, then if we give them this kind of problem, they should solve it this way. And sure enough, it turns out that over and over again, that's what they do, kind of independently of knowing very much about what exactly is going on in their brains when they're doing that. So again, it could be that this gap between the kinds of problems that we can solve computationally now and the kinds of problems that every four year old are solving, it could be that that's got something to do with having a biological substrate. But I don't think that's kind of the most likely hypothesis given the information that we have now. I think actually one of the interesting things is the problem is not so much trying to figure out what our representations and rules are, what's going on in our head, what the computations look like. The problem is what people in computer science call a search problem. So the problem is, really, given all the possible things we could believe about the world, or given all the possible solutions we could have to a problem, or given all the possible things that we could do in the world, how is it that we end up converging? How is it that we end up picking ones that are, as it were, the right ones, rather than all the other ones that we could consider? And that I think that's at the moment, that's the really deep, serious problem. So we kind of know how a computational system could be instantiated in a brain. We have ideas about how neurons could be configured so they could do computations. We kind of figured that part out. But the part about how we take all these possibilities and end up narrowing in on ones that are relatively good, relatively true, relatively effective, I think that's the really next deep problem. And looking at kids can help us to think about looking at how kids solve that problem we know that they do solve. It could help to let us make progress. Another name for this is common sense. What computers are famously bad at is, as you say, narrowing the search space of solutions to rule out the obviously ridiculous and detrimental ones. Right? This is where all the cartoons of AI apocalypse come in. The idea that you're going to design a computer to remove the possibility of spam and an easy way to do that is just kill all the people who would send spam, right? So obviously this is nobody's actual fear. It just points out that unless you build the common sense into these machines, they're not going to have it necessarily for free. The more and more competent they get at solving specific problems. But see, in a way it's even worse than that, because one thing you might say is, well, okay, we have some idea about what our everyday common sense is like. We have these principles. So if we could just sort of specify those things enough so we could take our everyday ideas about the mind, for example, or our everyday ideas about how the physical world works and we could build those into the computer. That would help. And it is true that the systems that we have now don't even have that. But the interesting thing about people is that we can actually discover new kinds of common sense. So we can actually go out in the world and say that thing that we thought about how the physical world worked, it's not true actually. We can have action at a distance, or even worse, it turns out that actually space and time can be translated into one another, which is certainly not anything that anyone intuitively thinks about how physics works. Or for that matter, we can say that thing that we thought that we knew about morality. It turns out that no, actually, when we think about it more carefully, something like gay marriage is not something that should be perceived as being immoral, even though lots and lots of people for a long time had thought that that was true. So we have this ability to go out into the world and both see the world in new ways and actually change the world invent new environments, invent new niches, invent new worlds, and then figure out how to thrive in those new worlds and look around the space of possibilities and create yet other worlds and repeat. So even if we could build in sort of what in 2019 is everybody's understanding about the world or build in the understandings about the world that we had in the police to scene, that still wouldn't capture this ability that we have to search the space to consider new possibilities, to think about new things that aren't there. And let me give you some examples. For instance, the sort of things that people are concerned about, I think legitimately concerned about, that AI could potentially do is, for example, you could give the kind of systems that we have now examples of all of the verdicts of guilty and innocent that had gone on in a court over a long period of time, and then get it to give it a new example and say, okay, how would this case be judged? Will it be judged innocent or will it be judged guilty? And the systems that we have now could probably do a pretty decent job of doing that and certainly changes to those systems. It's easy to imagine an extension of the systems we have now that could solve that kind of problem. But of course, what we can do is to say, you know what all that law? That's really not right, that isn't really capturing what we want. That's not enabling people to thrive now. We should think of a different way of thinking about making these kinds of judgments. And that's exactly the sort of thing that the current systems again, it's not just like if you gave them more data, they would be able to do that. They're not really even conceptually in the ballpark of being able to do that and that's probably a good thing. Now, I think it's important to say that, and I think you're going to talk to Stuart Russell who will make this point. These systems don't have to have anything like human level general intelligence to be really dangerous. Electricity is really dangerous. I just heard was talking to someone who made a really interesting point, which is about like, how did we invent circuit breakers? It turns out the insurance companies actually started insisting that people have circuit breakers on their electrical systems because houses were being set on fire. So electricity, which we now think of as being this completely benign thing we put on a switch and electricity comes out and none of us is sitting there thinking, oh my God, is our house about to burn down? That was only a very long, complicated process of regulation and legislation and work to get that to be other than a really, really dangerous thing. And I think that's absolutely true. Not about some theoretical, artificial general intelligence, but about the AI that we have now that it's a really powerful force. And like any powerful technology, we have to figure out ways of regulating it and having it make sense. But I don't think that's like a giant difference in kind from all the issues we've had about dealing with powerful technologies in the past. Yeah, I guess this issue of creativity and growth in intuitions is something I guess my intuitions divide from many people on this point because creativity is often held out as something that's fundamentally different, that our machines can't do this and we routinely do this. But in my view, creativity isn't especially creative in the sense that it clearly proceeds on the basis of rules we already have. And nothing is fundamentally new, down to the studs. Nothing that's meaningful is you can create something that essentially looks like noise, that is new, something that strikes us as insightful, meaningful, beautiful, is functioning on the basis of properties that our minds already acknowledge as relevant and are already using. And so you take something like, again, a simple case of a mathematical intuition that was fairly hard one and took thousands of years to emerge in someone's mind. But once you've got it, you sort of got it and it's really the same thing you're doing anyway, which is you take a triangle having 180 degrees on a flat plane, but you curve the plane and it can have more or less than that. And it's strange that it took so long to see that. But the scene of that doesn't strike me as fundamentally more mysterious in the fact that we can understand anything about triangles in the first place. I think I would just set that on its head in the sense that, again, this is one of the real advantages of studying young children is that when you say, well, it's no more mysterious than understanding triangles in the first place, people have actually tried to figure out how is it that we can understand triangles? How is it that children can understand basic things about how number works or in the work that I've done, how do children understand basic things about the causal structure of the world, for example? And it turns out that even very basic things that we take for granted, like understanding that you can believe something different from what I believe. For example, it's actually very hard to see exactly how it is that children are taking individual pieces and putting them together to putting them together to come to realizations about, say, how other people's minds work. And the problem is, if you're doing it backwards, once you know what the answer is, then you can say oh, I see. This is how you could put that together from pieces that you have in the world or from data that you have. But of course, if you're sort of doing it prospectively, then there's all sorts of incredibly large number of different other ways that you could have put together those pieces or you could have interpreted the data. And the puzzle is how is it that you came upon the one that was both new and interesting and wasn't just random. Now, again, I don't think there's any kind of giant reason why we couldn't solve that problem. But I do think that's looking at even something as simple as children figuring out basic things about how the world around them and the people around them work, that turns out to be a very tricky problem to solve. And one interesting thing, for example, that we found in our data, in our research is that in many respects children are actually better at coming to unlikely or new solutions than adults are. So again, this is this kind of trade off idea where actually the more you know in some ways, the more difficult it is for you to conceive of something new. We use a lot of bayesian ideas when we're trying to characterize what the children are doing. And one way you could think about it is that as your priors get to be more and more peaked, as you know, more and more as you're more and more confident about certain kinds of knowledge and that's a good thing, right? That's what lets you go out into the world and build things and make the world a better place. It gets to be harder and harder for you to conceive of new possibilities. And one idea that I've been arguing for is that you could think about the very fact of childhood as being a solution to this kind of explore exploit tension. This tension between exploring, being able to explore lots of different possibilities, even if they're maybe not very good, and having to narrow in on the possibilities that are really relevant to a particular problem. And again, that's the sort of thing that people or humans, over the course of their life, history and culture seem to be pretty good at doing in a way that we don't even really have a good start on thinking about how a computational system could do that. Now we're working on it. I mean, we're hoping that we could get a computational system that could do that and we have some sort of have some ideas, but that's a dimension that really, really differentiates what the current powerful AI systems can do and what every four year old can do. Yeah, no, I'm granting all of that. I guess I'm just putting the line at a different point because, again, people often hold out creativity and being able to form new goals and insights, intuitions, as though this were a uniquely human thing that was very difficult to understand how a machine could do. But as you point out, just being able to walk across the room is fairly miraculous from the point of view of how hard it is to instantiate in a robot and to ride a bicycle and to do things that kids routinely learn to do very early. My point is that once we crack that these fairly basic problems that evolution has solved for us and really for even non human animals in many cases, then we're talking about just incremental gains into something that is fundamentally beyond the human. I mean, because no one's putting the line that nobody says, well, yes, you know, you can you can might be able to build a machine that could run across a room like a human child and balance something on its finger. But you're never going to get something that can produce the creative genius of an Olympic athlete or a professional basketball player. But I don't, I mean, that's where I think the intuitions flip. I mean, once you, once you could build something that could move exactly like a person, then there is no limit to there's no example of human agility that will be out of sight at that point. And I think, I guess what I'm reacting to is that people seem to think different rules apply at the level of cognition and artistic creativity. Say, well, I think it's just an interesting empirical question. We're collaborating now on a big project with a bunch of people who are doing things in computer vision, for example. And that's another example where something that we think is very simple and straightforward. We don't even feel as if we do any effort to go out into the world and actually see the objects that are out there in the world. That turns out to be both extremely difficult and in some ways very mysterious that we can do that as well as we can. Not only do we identify images, but we can recognize that there's an object that's closer to me or an. Object that's further away from me, or that objects have texture, or that objects are really three dimensional. Those are all really, really challenging problems. And an interesting thought is that at a very high abstract level, it may be that we're solving some of those problems in the same way that enables us to solve some of these creativity problems. So let me give you an example. One of the things that the kids very characteristically do is do experiments, except that when they do experiments, we call it getting into everything they explore. They're not just sort of passively waiting for data to come to them. They can have a problem and actually go out and get the data that's relevant to that problem. Again, when they do that, we call it playing or getting into everything or making a mess, and we sit there and nod our heads and try and keep them from killing themselves when they're doing it. But that's a really powerful technique, a really powerful way of making progress, actually getting more information about what the structure of the world is like and then using it to change what you think about the world and then repeating by actually going out into the real world and getting data from the real world. And that's something that kids are very good at doing that seems to play a big role in our ability to do things like move around the world or do perform skilled actions. And again, that's something that, at least at the moment, isn't very characteristic of the way the machines work here's. Here's another nice example of something we're actually working on at Berkeley. So one of the things that we know about kids is their motivation and affect is that they're insatiably, curious. They just want to get as much information as they can about the world around them, and they're driven to go out and get information and especially get new information, which, again, is why just thinking about the way that we evolved isn't going to be enough to answer the problem. One of the things that's true about lots of creatures, but especially human children, is that they're curiosity driven. And in work that we've been doing with computer scientists at Berkeley, you can design an algorithm that, instead of, say, wanting to have a higher score, wants to have the predictions of its model be violated. So actually, when it has a model and things turn out to be wrong, instead of being depressed, it goes out and says, that's interesting. Let me try that again. Let me see what's going on with that little toy car that it's doing that strange thing. And you can show that a system that's got that kind of motivation can solve problems that your typical, say, reinforcement learning system can't solve. And that what we're doing, is actually comparing children and these curious AIS on the same problems to see the ways that the children are being curious and how that's related to the ways that the AIS are being curious. So I think you're absolutely right that the idea that the place where humans are going to turn out to be unique is in the great geniuses or the great artists or the great athletes. They're going to turn out to have some special sauce that the rest of us don't have, and that's going to be the thing that AI can't do. I think you're right that that's not really going to be true, that what those people are doing is an extension of the things that every two and three year old is equipped to do. But I also think that what the two and three year olds are equipped to do is going to turn out to be very different from at least what the current batch of AI is capable of doing. Yeah, well, I don't think anyone is going to argue there. Also, how do you think of consciousness in the context of this conversation? For me, I'll just give you one. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes, 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@samharris.org./n

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+There's so much here that's confusing. So let's first talk about what went wrong and what could have not gone wrong. Your whole podcast is about just having honest conversations about topics. It's offensive to your and my sense of justice. Do you actually care? How has my mind been fundamentally worked? So the topic today is the threat of nuclear war. Slow erosion of the social fabric, synthetic media revolution, collapse of our economy, the role of religion in public life, morality and moral disagreement. Breakdown of truth. I'm scared that us two in a room would egg each other on. You can't have a subtle argument anymore. There's no place for nuance. Everything has to be binary for the right people to agree and disagree. It's not a healthy place for society to be when everyone is afraid to say anything. I've learnt to exercise censorship on myself in a way that is deeply disturbing. I don't feel that I should have to. I appreciate who you are, really. And you elevated me and those ideas. I'll never forget you for it. We all danger during the Cold War, but blundering into a nuclear war and I believe that that is the same situation today and with at least the same likelihood today. You're so full of Christmas cheer today. I'm speaking with Robert Plumman here. I reached out to Jonathan Height, William J. Perry. I am here with Gabriel dance. Dartha Mukherjee david Miliband graham wood ricky Gervais steven fry james doe stone harris Michael. You all know a Ferrari. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. You./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one no housekeeping today. We will jump right into it. Today's episode is a conversation first had on Zoom for podcast subscribers with Gary Casparov, who perhaps needs no introduction. He's been on the podcast before. One of the greatest chess players of all time, world champion for many years. But in his more recent incarnation, he has been a tireless advocate for democracy and Western liberal values in his home country of Russia. And as you might imagine, he now has much to say about Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine. So we really cover the whole topic. We talk about how we got here, what the perception of the war is inside of Russia, the allegation that US and EU foreign policy is to blame, that NATO expansion has been too threatening. We talk about the perception of American weakness and how that might have provoked Putin. We notice in passing the otherwise unimaginable Republican support for Putin. We talk about the sanctions regime and how effective that may be. The extent to which Putin miscalculated in this war, whether he might be the victim of a popular uprising, whether the US and the EU should impose a no fly zone over Ukraine or insist upon regime change in Russia. And if we do either or both of those things, how we can avoid World War III. We talk about the role of China in all this and discuss the larger implications for the defense of the Western liberal order. Anyway, a useful and all too timely conversation. I think I may do some more of these live on Zoom, because you all seem to like that, and I hope you find the conversation useful. And now I bring you Gary Casparov. All right, well, just to remind everybody, this is a live recording of a podcast. So this is an opportunity for all of you to just watch us record a podcast. And I'm very happy that you're joining us. And I'm especially thankful to you, Gary, for taking the time to have this conversation with us, because I know you're inundated with demands on your time here. Many people know you as one of the greatest chess grand masters who's ever lived, and it's always fun to talk about that. But we've got other priorities now. Maybe remind us how you come to have such strong opinions on the topic. We're going to touch today. You for years have been politically active in and outside of Russia and a great advocate for democracy and Western liberal values. And you're working now with the Renewed Democracy Initiative and other orgs. Just tell us what you're doing on this front. I grew up in the Soviet Union, and I had my own experience living in unfree country and dealing with KGB that's every other Soviet citizen and of course, as being chess prodigy and top grandmaster and eventually world champion. So I was under very special attention of party officials and KGB operatives. And when I saw Vladimir Putin taking over at the end of 99, year 99 so I have to say I was stumped because during his glorious days of August revolution in the Soviet Union, august 9091, when the Jubilant crowds toppled the statue of the KGB founder Felix Derzinsky LBNCo Square in Moscow. I don't believe anybody could bet one, 2 million that in less than nine years, KGB lieutenant Colonel would be in charge of Russian affairs again. And it was not just about a KGB officer. Vladimir Putin was quite frank explaining his views of the world even before he became President of Russia, being a prime minister and hair apparent of Boris Yelsen, he spoke at the gathering of KGB officers in their headquarters, which was televised. And he said there were no former KGB officers. One KGB. Always KGB. He never tried to hide his sympathies for the Soviet Union. It's his famous phrase repeated many times. The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of 20th century. The first thing he did as the president of Russia is a restoration of Soviet national anthem and, of course, the war in Chechnya, carpet bombing of Grosby and other Chechen towns and villages, very mysterious explosions of apartment blocks in Moscow and other Russian cities as a pretext for this war. I didn't know what could have happened, but I knew that the guy could be a great danger for the world if given the chance. And every time he did something, that was a warning signal to me. I tried to communicate my concern to the rest of the world. And I think that it was modern enough to listen to Vladimir Putin in person. If nobody cared what Gary Kasparov or Boris Nemtsov said about Putin and repeatedly said Putin was our problem, but at one point it would be everybody's problem. But Putin himself at some point decided that he could express his views about the future of our planet in public. 15 years ago in Munich, at security conference in Europe, he talked openly to the world leaders about what he called fears of influence, returning to not even the 20th century. To the 19th century, where the big countries, big guys, as he said, would be in charge of all affairs and will dictate to smaller countries how to behave. And he believed that Russia, under his command, was entitled to control not just former Soviet Union, but Eastern Europe. It was within Russia's heritage rights. And every time that he did something to materialize his views, like attacking Republic of Georgia in 2008 or annexing Crimea in 2014, I thought that the world would wake up because he did it. And unfortunately, nothing happened. So basically, we are now in this in this tragic situation, and Ukrainians are paying with their blood every every not day, every second as we speak it's because for so many years, nobody wanted to take this threat seriously. We read history books about 1930s, and many of us, I guess, as myself, were surprised. How come that nobody could see the danger coming from Hitler. Because in 1933 was one story 34, another story, 35, 36, 37. But when I mentioned Hitler or just Berlin Olympic Games in 1936, compared them to 2014 Sochi Games, I was ostracized by international media saying, how could you compare anyone to Adele Hitler? And I said, Look, Hitler hitler is a monster with no comparison, but it's Hitler of 1941. 42 and onward. But in 1936 just read your newspapers. American, canadian. German. German. French. British. And he was treated differently. So again, dictators never ask why, so why not? And Putin attacked Ukraine now because he believed that he could get away with this crime, as he did many times in the past. And these are the Ukraine Putin said many times. Also, we just again, you don't have to take my word. Ukraine was not a real estate. According to Vladimir Putin, he believed that Ukraine basically belonged to Russia and could be split between Russia, maybe Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine. For him was something like Poland for Stalin, an obstacle on the way for their geopolitical plans. So what do you say to people who you hear from now, both on the left and the right, certainly in American politics, that there's been something provocative about US. And EU foreign policy, that NATO expansion is really the reason why Putin has done this? You have to sort of see it from his side and sympathize with his security concerns. We're hearing a fair amount about this, and I guess you might even just run through some recent presidents and just how their dithering has enabled Putin's sense that he could do this right? I mean, there's been something provocative about American weakness too. So I guess I've asked you two questions there. What's the role played by NATO and NATO expansion? And what's the role played by just the perception of American and European weakness and internal division? I think we're dealing with two separate questions. So one is more strategic, one is more tactical. So I use the chess metaphors. So I'm always reluctant to use chess metaphors discussing Putin. I prefer poker. But in this case, let's start with this. The argument about NATO expansion and provocative foreign policy of NATO. Did I hear you say EU, European Union, provocative politics it's a toothless organization that they buy a lot of shadow, but it's good because that's the way that everything is in mixed. It's like a salad. Oh, it's NATO, EU, all sorts of the guys that are trying to attack Mother Russia. That's a classical Russian propaganda, unfortunately, parroted by people on the right and on the left. Some of them are on the payroll, some of them are useful idiots. But these argument scenarios could be discussed before Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Now, looking at the war crimes on an industrial scale, I hope some of these people should now recognize that they were not just wrong, they were dead wrong. And their attempts, maybe gender attempts to spread the blame, emboldened Putin to move beyond Imaginable, because so many times we heard, no, Putin would never do that. The list of things that Putin would never down because it's so bad, it's too long. And now I think everybody recognizes that the man cannot be stopped until he stopped. And same people who said he would never do that, now they are seriously discussing whether you can use nukes. Now, speaking about these so called concerns, I don't think we can blame Pauls or Lithuanians or Estonians or Latvians who rush to NATO because they had an experience, a genetic memory of being occupied. The price they paid for Soviet occupation was too high just to blame them for their desire to join NATO and to hide under American nuclear umbrella. Now, speaking about threat to Russia, estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the three Baltic states, they joined NATO officially in 2003. The distance between Estonia and St. Petersburg is about 150 miles. I never heard about any threat coming from Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania or even Poland to Russia. It's about Russia. It's about Russian aggressive wars and open threats to the neighboring countries that we reach these climates. Now speaking about American aggressive policy clinton bush 40 bush 43 obama trump Biden I'm not here just debating their political views, but until very recently, it was concession after concession. And I think that if we try to understand Putin's rationale, if you may call the rationale for attacking Ukraine, it's not NATO strength, but it's a weakness, it's lack of American leadership. And he's believed that he could get away with direct assault on Ukraine de facto, if not the Euro liquidation of an independent nation and installment of a puppet government, and continuation of his imperial policies beyond Russian border or even beyond former Soviet Union. Let's not forget this is Putin had other qualified foreign adventures. What about Syria? So I don't think there's any argument about Syrian rebels threatening Russia, but Russian planes carpet bombed Aleppo. Gary, do you share the view that Putin significantly miscalculated how the west would respond and just how world opinion would turn against this war so quickly? Yes and no. I mean, he made mistakes in his calculations, but it's probably not so much about Western response immediate response because he had a simple plan. The way I see it, and what I read from Russian propaganda machine and Putin, by the way, he has been building his military presence around Ukraine for quite a while. Unlike the dictators of the past that tried to hide their plans, putin was quite open about it. He even brought part of his Pacific fleet to the Black Sea. Last time I looked at the map, it's quite a distance. And he surrounded Ukraine from East Russia, South Crimea, and also from Belarus from the north. So the Ukraine was surrounded and he had Russian fleet in the Black Sea ready to shell Ukrainian Ukrainian infrastructure. And last year, there was an argument that Putin did it all for blackmail. He wanted to squeeze concessions out of Ukraine, maybe. But I think that is just after he met President Biden in Geneva. We all remember this summit. And the summit was, according to American administration, all about Ukraine. And Biden and his team said that they looked at Putin, put straight in Putin's eyes, and said, forget about it. If you do it, we'll impose sanctions. Just that's beyond your imagination. I don't think Putin believed him. It's just that there was, as we were told, some decrease of the tension around Ukraine. But Putin hasn't removed his troops. So he looked around and then he continued his build up. Then there was one call between Biden and Putin, same result. Then the third call, I think that is this is what Putin read. Putin's reading of these calls was america was not ready, was not ready to pose him decisively. And also while American intelligence it's not me, it's U. S. Intelligence. And biden is not Trump. Trump didn't trust American intelligence. Biden did. Kept repeating over last few months, attack was imminent. The question is why? If attack was imminent, ukraine received no military support that could inflict greater, much greater damages to to Russian troops, especially to Russian warships and Russian plates. So why do you think that is? Why didn't we support them earlier? I think that because Biden administration played game. Again, either we say on many chess boards, or if we use poker analogy, on many tables. United States viewed Russia as a partner in climate change talks. You have to listen to John Kerry, who even mentioned the climate change talks after Putin's attack on Ukraine, but more importantly on Iran. I think it's some sort of a cognitive dissonance to have Russia as a part of the Iranian deal, which is, as we've been told, to prevent Iran from getting nuclear, and Russia has to stockpile enriched uranium from Iran. And Russia today is a country that is openly threatening to use nukes in conventional conflict. So I think that the US administration tried to separate these issues and Putin saw nothing but weakness. So he could downplay Americans warnings about Ukraine because he could always negotiate. And he's quite good. Give him credit. He's very good in negotiating and shifting these bargaining chips. On this table of Jubilee Casino, it's poker. He's a great poker player who used to bluff and to win, because even if he had a weak hand, he raised the stakes so high that opponents always folded the cards. Can you generalize about the perception of the war inside of Russia? Or I guess, look, the question is, how effective do you think the propaganda is domestically in Russia? It's a question there. It's not just about information that's available or not available in Russia, because Putin now is closing every hole that we could use to send messages to Russian people. The Internet is still functioning there, but Facebook is now banned. Twitter now YouTube is just slowing down. So there are very few channels left for information to travel back to Russia, because the pictures from Ukraine, they are very different from what Putin expected. And I think now this is talking about information war. So the Putin is losing it because his main plan to take over Ukraine failed miserably. No doubt that he wanted to and he believed he could, to take over Kiev within two, three days after beginning of his advance, since the distance to Kiev from Belarus was very much shorter than from Russia. And he thought that the moment he takes over Kiev, zelensky is on the run, ukrainian government is paralyzed, or just it's gone. The infrastructure infrastructure is broken. And his puppet is sitting in Kiev as the newly proclaimed leader of Ukraine, maybe Victorianokovic, the deposed president who was hiding in Russia after he was kicked out from Ukraine in 2014. And he expected, and not without a reason, that the free world would be talking to him. And we'll hear so many pragmatists saying, oh, it's a new geopolitical reality, the same way they told us about this after Crimea. Oh, it was bad, but we had now had no choice but to accommodate Putin because what else we can do? So this is classic, nothing is being done, and eventually say it's too late for anything. So nothing had been done now. And the failure to take over Kiev and to break stiff Ukrainian resistance in Kiev and Harika and other other major cities, I think, led to the change of the strategy and, and bombardment of Ukrainian cities. In the first three days, they tried to avoid direct hits. The campaign was very different. They it obviously they, they hit occasionally few buildings, but it was very clear that they, they had an order to avoid civilian casualties because Putin wanted to present the story of liberation of Ukraine. Only when he failed in Kiev, they changed it. And now that says they try to bombard Ukraine into submission, same way they did in Grossly or in Aleppo in 2015. And I think the information actually is traveling to Russia even through this Putin's information bubble. One of the reasons massive Russian losses massive losses. I think we can trust Ukrainian sources because they they they count it's. It's head. It's good head count. There are more than 11,000 soldiers being killed. We don't know how many wounded. The reports that are finding its way through the censorship in Crimea telling us about the hospitals, they are overcrowded with wounded, sick and wounded. So it seems that, again, from various sources that I think we can trust with some level of confidence that public opinion in Russia is slowly shifting because you can't deceive people all the time. It's already nearly two weeks. We are at war. And by the way, now the war's, war is banned in Russia. So this is the new laws that have been adopted by Russian puppet parliament. Now, if you are protesting in the war, if you are standing in the streets of Russia with a poster note war, three years in jail. If you try to tell Russian people using your social media account in Russia about Russian losses in Ukraine and about just tell anything that contradicts official version of events in Ukraine, which is called special Operation of War, up to 50 years in prison. So that tells you that the truth is a mortal enemy for Putin's propaganda. They are afraid of it as much as vampires are scared of daylight. On that point, do you think Putin is vulnerable to some domestic uprising at this point? Whether it's coming from the top, from oligarchs, or it's coming from an anti war movement lower down, what's the prospect that we could see Putin actually unseeded by this and see a complete reset of the Russian government, I mean, navalny coming out of prison, et cetera? No. As for Alexi, I've been saying that Alexi got life in prison, putin's life. As long as Putin is in Kremlin, Alexi will be in prison. The moment Putin is out, Alexi is also out. And I'm sure if he survives, god forbid anything horrible happens to him in Putin's jail. So he will definitely play a role in very important role in the future of my country. But analyzing the probabilities of some sort of uprising and you've put together all these ingredients, oligarchs, police, army, security apparatus, popular uprising, political and social economic protests. I think what we're seeing now, it's quite a significant political protest. When it's significant, it is quite amazing. And I was very proud for tens of thousands of people who made it to the streets of Russia. You say, oh, country of 145,000,000, and you have what, 20, 30, 40,000 people protesting is the war. But that's not demonstration in New York or in San Francisco or in Berlin or London. You go to the streets protesting is the war, almost guaranteed, beaten, arrested, detained, and then you can end up in jail for many years. So for people of different ages, you can look at them, this is demographics. It's very broad to take this risk just to defend I don't know whether they think about the owner of the country or about their own feelings. I feel incredible. I'm a Russian citizen. When I just talk to Ukrainian journalists and I do it every day, it's tough because it's being done. It's not on my behalf. I'm one of the staunchest opponents of puts in from day one. He's day one in the office. But still, it's Russia that brought death and destruction to Ukrainian soil. And many people, I think, feel the same, and they just believe that they have no other choice, even with a huge risk but to show up on the streets. Nobody's going to defend them, nobody knows their names, but it's a very personal choice. But that's not something that can shatter the Putin's dictatorship. But if sanctions are working, and I say real sanctions, sanctions that will throw Russia back to the technological Stone Age, sanctions that will include financial, economic, technological measures, also total isolation and eventual military defeat in Ukraine. This combination could create an explosive mixture that could lead to a social economic protest. And that's a revolt that will bring millions of people to the streets. And if Putin is running out of cash, and it looks now that he is no longer in charge of the greatest fortune in the history of humanity, because most of the assets are frozen, so how he's going to pay for his military, police and propaganda? So that's why I think the chances for massive revolt against Putin within the next month or two, if situation doesn't change on the ground and and and the war continues, more losses and the free world stands firm, united against Putin might lead to internal conflict, because loyalty, you don't see a possible backlash against the sanctions. If the sanctions are really biting the people of Russia, could they be perceived through a Russian nationalist lens, basically confirming that the west is the enemy of Russia and that Putin is right to view it? As I hear this argument all the time, I think it's just it's not realistic yet for maybe for a day, maybe for a week, for two weeks. They can blame the west. At the end of the day, you have to feed your family. And it's Putin who started the war, and people have to find solution. And free world is far away. The west is far away. Putin and Putin's cronies are just nearby. So I don't think that we should now worry about the hard economic hardship. I sympathize with these people, but please don't tell me about that when Ukraine is being killed. It's not about economic hardship. It's people, women, children, elderly being killed as we speak now. So it's time for Russians to make a choice, and I wish they could rise earlier. And it will influence people around Putin, his henchmen, his cronies, because they are loyal to him, not because of ideology, great ideas, communism, imperialism, Russian nationalism. It's a mafia state. Every state has its mafia. But in Russia mafia state, and Putin is a mafia boss, Kapo de Tutapi. And he again, give him credit. He built this very sophisticated system where loyalty is just being changed for personal gains. But people who always show loyalty to him for personal gains, for benefits, I don't think they're willing to die for you, whether they are just from his government security apparatus or his military. That's why I'm so adamant demanding the no fly zone, because I don't think that Russian pilots will be willing to sacrifice their lives to give Putin a pretext to start a war against NATO. I want to see how many Russian pilots or Russian generals will follow Putin's orders to enter confrontation with NATO, because that's for them, it's it's a suicide. And I don't think that the morale in Russian army, in Russian political circles, in security apparatus, it's it's can be can resemble anything that we witnessed in Hitler Germany or Stalin Soviet Union, because many old dictatorship, they had this ideological craziness and fanaticism. I don't see it in Russia. It's all about, oh, we can, we do it because we can do it. If we cannot do it, I'm not so sure that they will be willing to put their lives at risk. I want to talk about the strategic logic of a no fly zone. But one more question on sanctions. What do you think about the strategy of rolling them out, incrementally the way we have? Naively. When I look at this, it seems I understand the logic of holding something in reserve so that you can, when Putin calls our bluff again and again, we can ratchet the sanctions on him. But why on earth are we still buying Russian oil and gas? We're directly funding his war on a daily basis. What do you think of the sanction regime thus far? And what do you think we should have done differently? This is a very important question, Sam. It just helps us to understand the roots of the current crisis, because, in theory, incremental sanctions could influence decisions of a potential aggressor. But it's important that you have an adequate response. Now, even 50% of the sanctions that have been imposed lately, maybe 25% of the sanctions in 2014 after annexation of Crimea, could have saved us from this nightmare. Right. Some sanctions imposed, let's say, between Geneva summit and first biden, putin zoom call. So from June 2021 to, I think, November last year, also could actually send a message to Putin and his and his inner circle that America was serious. I think the big mistake was to threaten the sanctions without actually doing it. So now we reached a point where, unfortunately, no half measures will work. And that's another rule that I learned from history books, and unfortunately, we're all learning today, every day of our delay, responding decisively to the threat of a dictator. The price goes up. And something that could have worked before. The invasion doesn't work now. When Americans, american administration talked about sanctions as a threat, I said many times I put it on, it was on my Twitter or my Facebook. Sanctions cannot stop tanks if tanks are rolling, if planes are just dropping bombs. So sanctions could actually help to prevent it. Maybe. But now we reach the point where it's no longer prevention. It's about solving the problem. You do not compromise with cancer. You have to cut it out. And I think now there's no other choice for us to see that the end of the war must lead to the collapse of Putin's regime. Because as long as Putin stays in Kremlin, there will be no peace. So would you favor ramping up all 100% sanctions at this point so that we exert every feature of economic war we can all of a sudden look oil embargo sounds great, but I said it was not even necessary. If America could impose technological embargo because Russian oil industry will not function without or gas industry without a full attack support from from the free world. But obviously no oil embargo has a psychological effect. My only concern is that doing this oil embargo, we are helping other bad guys. As much as I'm concerned about Putin and his criminal war in Ukraine and people being killed all the time, look, helping Iran, Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, those are also bad guys with blood on their hands. I understand there's a balance. So you just have to find a balance. What I think is important now is to come up with a strategy, because at the end of the day, look, we're all concerned about climate change, but what's the difference? There's more oil from Venezuela or more oil from America at the end of the day, or from Canada? So I think it's important to agree on priorities. And if priorities are about Putin and about the let's be honest about change of the regime and Russia, then we have to concentrate on this goal. And I think it can be done. But I'm not sure that there is an agreement about the future goals and how we're going to solve Putin's problem, which does not disappear with the defeat of his armies in Ukraine. And also we are all talking, you just mentioned in the beginning of our conversation about Putin's attempts, crazy attempts, to spread the war beyond Ukrainian borders. So I think it's time to recognize that we are playing the game again. Let me use chess analogy this time. That cannot end in a tie. That's why it's not exactly chess. Either we win or Putin wins. And I think we just have to do whatever mobilizing all the resources of the free world and from political to call it spiritual and ideological, because Ukraine, I think, gave us very powerful spirit to show how to fight and die for freedom and democracy and to make sure that as. A result of this war, not only Ukraine will be safe and will restore its territorial integrity, but Russia will become free. You've spoken two phrases that I think are going to strike fear in many people. The first is a no fly zone, and the second is regime change. And each in their own way, by a slightly different logic, seems to invite a serious escalation of the conflict and even the threat of a nuclear war, right? So, I mean, many people are looking at the situation and all of their bandwidth is taken up with a concern about just avoiding World War Three. How do we prosecute this conflict in such a way as to know that we're not going to go over the brink here? And so let's take them by turns. A no fly zone? A no fly zone seems synonymous with a shooting war between the US. EU and Russia, which is to say a conventional shooting war with nuclear armed powers, where one is run by a psychopath who increasingly has less and less to lose and who's already threatened in some form to use nuclear weapons if he's antagonized. So talk to me about a no fly zone. How is it that you can advocate that? Again, we're dealing with a strategic question because you raised a very good point and I again hear this all the time. No fly zone involves considerable naming a family. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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 sam Harris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. My guest today is Timothy Snyder. Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar before joining the faculty at Yale in 2001. He held fellowships in Paris, Vienna and Warsaw. And an Academy scholarship at Harvard. He has spent some ten years in Europe and speaks five and reads ten European languages. He's also written for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation and The New Republic, as well as for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and he's the author of several award winning books, including The Red Prints, bloodlands Europe between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth the Holocaust as History and Warning. His latest book on tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, which is what we focused on, is currently number one on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction in paperback. As you'll hear, this is a timely conversation, but please take my early admonishments about the nonpartisan nature of this conversation for what they are. We do talk a lot about Trump, but whether or not Trump is actually an example of Snyder's thesis can definitely be held to one side. You'll figure out what I think about that by the end, but it's actually not the core of the conversation. And now I give you Timothy Snyder. I am here with Timothy Snyder. Timothy, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. You have written this beautiful little book on tyranny. When did you write this? Because it's a very short book. I'm a huge fan of short books now, both as a reader and as a writer. Most books are far too long. Certainly argument driven books tend to be far too long because the dirty little secret about publishing is that publishers haven't figured out how to publish short books and still make enough of a profit. A 300 page book could be 60 pages in many cases, but to publish a 60 page book just is not a profitable enterprise. But anyway, you've written a very short book on tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th century. I just want to move through this book fairly systematically. But when did you write it? Because this reads as something you wrote the moment Trump became president. When did you actually start typing? So I'm going to give you a slightly pompous historian's answer and maybe defend publishers a little bit, too. It's true that I wrote it very quickly, but it was a compression of longer spans of time, right? So it's a compression of the history of the 20th century, which in turn I've spent 25 years trying to understand. And along the way, many years have been invested very pleasantly in friendships with people who have lived through communism and sometimes fascism. And then fewer years, but still more than I'd like to admit, with students from Eastern Europe who themselves have lived through the failed promise of democracy and who have learned about resistance or relearned about it. And I've tried to learn from them. So, yeah, I'll tell you when I wrote the book and how quickly I wrote the book, but it's as though all these layers of time are simultaneously present. I couldn't have just sat down and written the thing without all of that previous time weighing down on me. What I was trying to do was to convert all of that into a format that would be immediately useful. So, yeah, I mean, I wrote the 20 lessons in a few hours after the election, and then the book I wrote in December in a few days. But in a way like that itself demonstrates one of the points of the book, which is that we are in a critical moment where we don't have very much time, and so whatever was going to make a difference had to appear immediately at the very beginning. And I'm not sure that my press in fact, I'm sure that my press hasn't solved the problem of how to make money out of a short book. I don't think they're making any money. But what they did do was join in this venture very enthusiastically, and for that I'm really appreciative. Oh, yeah, no, it's fantastic you have 20 lessons here, and maybe we'll just get through the first ten or so, but I just want to make it clear that I don't view this conversation as a surrogate for someone buying the book, no matter how comprehensive we seem to be in talking about it. And this can be generically said of the conversations I have with most authors. I try to not put people in competition with the free versions of themselves that exist online. I want people to buy people's books. But in this case, this really is just such a satisfying read. So I just want to make it clear that our listeners should buy this book and read it. You can read it in an hour. You can probably read it more quickly than we will have this conversation. But first of all, your writing is so wonderful and so lapidary and aphoristic that it's a pleasure to read. And I'll read a few pieces from it as we talk. Here one criticism of this book, and we'll get into this, and people will get a sense of just how worried you can sound about our current moment in history. One criticism is that it exaggerates the danger of Trump. And I'm wondering how you feel the book is aging over the first few months of the Trump presidency. Is there anything that has reassured you? Or are you exactly where you were when you hit send to your publisher? So let me again take a slightly different angle on that. The whole point of the book is that we have to spread out our political imagination and have a broader sense of what's possible. And the danger precisely is that we just go day by day, and then every day seems normal, even if, you know, today is much worse than yesterday. We're very good at getting used to today, and then tomorrow the same thing happens. So I didn't write the book, in fact, directly about Trump, although it is striking and I'll start to answer your question it is striking how many of the things I wrote about actually have happened. In the meantime, I wrote the book more for us. It was clear from 2016 that we were dealing with a candidate who didn't respect basic American institutions like the rule of law or democracy. It was clear that we were dealing with a man who was not tolerant, to put it very mildly, and who had a certain vision about how things should be run, which was not consistent with checks and balances or institutional constraints. It was clear that we had a man whose political heroes were foreign dictators, who had precisely done away with the rule of law after being elected. So the question is not really so much Trump. The question is us. What happens in these situations is a person with the kind of character that he has, who finds himself in an institutional situation that constrains him, will push against those constraints. He can't really do anything else. That's who he is. And so the relevant question is more can those constraints hold him? And even more to the point, what can we do to make sure those constraints hold him? That's what the book is really about. So when I first posted the 20 lessons, there were a lot of people who thought that I was going overboard. But I have to say, as time has gone past, that has ceased to be a major reaction. And the more dominant reaction has been, how did you see this coming? And the simple answer is that history doesn't repeat, but history gives you a much broader palette of what's possible. And the point of the book is not to go point by point and hit off particular things that Trump will do so much as to prepare ourselves to do a whole bunch of different things which make an authoritarian regime change less likely. So, yeah, I mean, some things people have done, I've been reassured by. I've been reassured by lawyers filing briefs in advance. I've been reassured by the the spontaneous protests at airports. I've been reassuring reassured by the marches. I've been reassured by the new non governmental organizations that didn't exist before. I've been I've been reassured by the civic mindedness and patriotism of some of our civil servants. I've been reassured by the investigative journalism, especially investigative print journalism, at the Washington Post. But on the other side, we have plenty of people who don't see that there's a problem at all. We have plenty of people who are doing the normal human thing of just normalizing the situation and basically taking whatever they're given from day to day. So my fundamental reaction about the notion that I'm exaggerating is Americans are super provincial. We don't really have a sense of what's possible because we've been lucky. We overestimate how much we deserve what we get, and we underestimate how we can just simply get unlucky. At the moment, we're unlucky, which means that at the moment, more is demanded of us than would otherwise be the case. Yeah, I don't want people to get the wrong sense of the connection between your book and this current moment, because, again, it does read not as narrowly focused on Trump. But you're talking about how democracies can fail and how people can not realize that they are being pulled by the tide of history in a very unlucky direction with great consequence. So we're going to get into this specifically now and talk about your points, even if you were wrong about Trump, if Trump just has a stroke tomorrow and becomes magically the perfect president, the generic case still holds. If not Trump, then someone. And the election of Trump has proven to many of us, certainly all of us who are alarmed by it, that our system is vulnerable to a demagogue in a way that many of us haven't anticipated. And it's scary for me to imagine someone much more competent than Trump and much more ideological, much more nefarious, but who can find the loophole in our system the way Trump did and come to power. And so I don't want to give people the wrong sense that this is narrowly focused on Trump. And you handle it beautifully because you may mention his name once in here, but you generally just refer to the President, which I thought was very artful, and the book will age well. This is not a book that five years from now is going to read like a magazine article. I want to pick up on the point you just raised about how provincial Americans are and you say here in the beginning, americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the 20th century. And then you say one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Why are we so blinkered? Yeah, thank you for putting the question so boldly, because it's a really important one. If we're going to get out of this mess, we're going to have to notice some of our weaknesses. We've gotten into the habit of congratulating ourselves on our strengths, and this is a ritual that both Democrats and Republicans engage in in their different ways. I think it was one of the weaknesses of Obama rhetoric, for example, that we were constantly got into the habit of telling ourselves how good we were at certain things. I think there are three things at play here. The first is the long standing religious tradition of exceptionalism, the notion that Americans were escaping a world of evil into a pure world, which is, of course, ridiculous on a whole number of fronts, but it's there as a tradition. The second is the obvious fact that we are in many ways a world unto ourselves. And so people who work on American history rarely venture beyond American history. So it's a lot to expect that the American citizen could do could do better. And the third thing, and maybe the most relevant, is that in a move which I think is going to be remembered as one of metaphysical laziness, we decided after 1989 that history was over. And therefore we disarmed ourselves against the very threats which history ought to have been reminding us of, and we prevented ourselves from seeing some of the weaknesses in our in our own system. So after 19, eight, nine, I mentioned 1999 because that's the year when communism came to an end. Of course, after that, many of us got ourselves worked into various versions of a story whereby human nature would lead to a market, which would lead to democracy and enlightenment, which would lead to peace or something like that, which is basically a historical nonsense. I mean, there are more left wing versions of this as well, but all of these theological stories are basically wrong. History is always going to be full of surprises and structural forces that we don't anticipate and accidents. And the very fact of claiming that history is over is itself a historical choice. It's a historical choice to be ignorant, to forget the concepts which were once useful. And it's a historical choice to be vulnerable when threats start to seep up on you again. That's what's happened to us that was part of the perfect storm of 2016, is that it happened a full generation after 1989. In a way, it's the payback for deciding that history was over. That's part of what happened. And you describe fascism and communism both as responses to globalization and this antipathy for globalization obviously played an important role in the 2016 election. Talk about that a little bit. How is a recoil from the world responsible for these antidemocratic tendencies. Thanks for bringing that up, because that's an important part of the answer to some of your other really good questions. So if we just take a step back and think about globalization itself, that concept is a good example of how we're trapped in a present and have trouble seeing the past. The whole paradigm of globalization as we've invented it for ourselves in the 21st century assumes that it's something new. And when you assume that something is new, then you don't see that it has arc. You don't see that it has patterns. You don't learn where it might be going. And the basic fact and this is one of the things that historians bang their foreheads against the table about the basic fact is that this is the second globalization. There was a very similar movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We had the same expansion of a foreign trade. We had the same export driven growth. And interestingly, maybe most interestingly, in the late 19th century, we had much the same thing as we had in the late 20th century. We had the idea that these expansions of trade would inevitably lead to expansions of consciousness and that universal ideas would inevitably triumph. So we've been down this road before. This is the intellectual history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that globalization ends in, as we all know, the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. So the whole point of remembering this is to be braced on the one hand, to be braced, be braced in the sense of being sobered up, realizing that globalization can also go in these ways, that we shouldn't be surprised, that there are contradictions in it and reactions to it, and that some of them can be quite extreme. But it's also bracing in the sense that it reminds us that there are people who live through this the first time around who are perhaps not only more experienced than we are because they came out the other end of it. They survived, but more articulate and perhaps wiser than we are. And we can save a lot of time by drawing on what they left behind, which is which is the point of the book. But anyway, that's just all prologue to trying to answer your question. It's natural that globalization is going to bring, even if it brings an average improvement in some kind of abstract notion of well being, like GDP per capita, that is going to also produce local or fractally local inequalities, and it's going to produce various kinds of resentments, because globalization also is the globalization of comparison. It means that people compare themselves to other people in ways that they hadn't done before and can often subjectively feel themselves to be the victims, whether or not they are objectively. That's clearly happened in the United States in the 21st century. Something similar happened in the middle of Europe in the early 20th century. And in that environment, it's very easy then for clever politicians to come around and say, look, globalization is not complicated. It's actually simple. It's not a multi vector challenge. It's actually a conspiracy. I will put a face on globalization for you. And the way that fascism and National Socialism worked was usually to put a Jewish face on globalization and to say, look, all these problems are not the result of an unhindered process which nobody controls completely, but they're actually a result of a particular conspiracy of a particular group that's very powerful politically, because then you can get your hands on, figuratively and literally, you can get your hands on members of that group who are inside your country, and you can imagine that you're carrying out some kind of political change. So similarly, although, you know, in in a minor key, if we think about the US in the 21st century, you think about the campaign now, the presidency of Donald Trump, you see basically the same reaction to globalization. The problem is not that the United States can't control everything. The problem is not that globalization is always going to be full of challenges, which we need to actually face and try to address. The problem is not that we need to have state policy. No, says Mr. Trump. The problem is that globalization has a face. It has a Chinese face, it has a Mexican face, it has a Jewish face. That is a familiar form of politics, because what that does is it relieves Mr. Trump and the government in general of any obligation of actually addressing the challenges of globalization. And instead, it replaces that with a form of politics in which we are meant to just chase after the supposed members of these various groups. And while we do that, then we forget about what the government is supposed to be doing for us, namely, making us more prosperous. So the attempt at a Muslim ban is terrible for Muslims, but it's not really about Muslims. It's about getting us into the habit of seeing Muslims as a source of our problems. The new denunciation office at Homeland Security, where you're supposed to call up a bureaucrat in Washington if you think you've been a victim of a crime by an undocumented migrant, that's not about the migrants. It's about getting you into the habit of denouncing your neighbors. It's about bringing in a new form of politics. So this is how anti globalization politics works. You give up, you say, we can't handle it. We don't have the strength to deal with this. We're going to personalize it all. And that changes politics inside the country in ways that we're starting to see. Well, when you put it that way, when you say it's not about undocumented migrants, it's about ushering in a new kind of politics, right, where you have people informing on their neighbors, that seems to attribute some kind of nefarious intention or agency on the part of people who are currently in government. It's not a system working unconsciously in this direction. This is people and correct me if I'm wrong it sounds like you are alleging that people are having consciously undemocratic thoughts, whether we want to call them fascistic or or some other flavor of edging toward tyranny. We can table that for a second. Yes, we do have people in the White House, such as Mr. Bannon, who are quite consciously ideological and think in far right traditions that are anti democratic. We have a President of the United States who spent 2016 telling us that democracy is basically faked, which is one of the things that people say in the first stages of regime changes. When it comes to denunciation, I think people half understand what they're doing, and then when it happens, they take they take the next step, whether it's the administration or whether it's the citizens doing the denouncing. You you cross a certain moral threshold when you do it, but if you denounce somebody, you get praised for doing it, and then maybe you get the first crack at their property or whatever might follow, and then a new cycle begins. So, yes, I would say quite clearly, there are people who do have what you're calling anti democratic thoughts. Absolutely. Part of the whole point of history is to recognize that democracy is not automatic, and there are plenty of people who don't like it. But also there are these processes by which both civil servants and citizens get drawn in and then find themselves in a different moral place afterwards, even if they didn't completely understand what they were doing at the beginning. Yeah. Okay, well, I want to get directly into your book and into the lessons. I just want some of this language inserted into the conversation. The first lesson is do not obey in advance. And then you have these summaries before each chapter. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given in times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. And then you talk about how the Nazis moved into Austria and how really the behavior of the Austrians more or less unbidden taught the Nazis how far they could go in victimizing the Jews. And you seem to suggest that there was something to learn from how readily people acquiesced to this project. Yeah. So, thank you. That's lesson number one, don't know bay in advance. And it's number one for a bunch of reasons. One, as you suggest, it is right at the core of what historians think we understand about authoritarian regime changes, nazi Germany in particular, but also in general, namely that at the very beginning, whether it's the takeover in Germany itself or whether it's the angels in austria at the very beginning, authoritarian leaders require consent. This is a really important thought because when we think of authoritarians, we then think of villains and then we think of supervillains. Then we think of superpowers. We imagine these guys in uniforms who can just stride across the stage of history and do whatever they want. And maybe towards the end something like that is true. But at the beginning it's not. At the beginning, interestingly, people have, in a sense more power than they do normally because they have the power to resist. The problem is that we don't usually realize that. The problem is that we tend as human beings to take new situations as normal and then to align ourselves with them. Our little needle compasses look for the new true north and align ourselves to it. We follow along, we drift. And most of the time that's appropriate, but sometimes it's an absolute disaster. So historians generally agree about that, which is notable because historians, particularly historians of Nazi Germany don't always agree about everything, to put it mildly. The other reason it's at the front of the book is that if you blow it, if you blow number one, then you can forget about the rest. Because if you if you can't do don't obey in advance, which is harder than it sounds, if you can't do that, then the rest of them become will become impossible because the rest of them will seem psychologically senseless to you if you fail not to bay in advance. If instead you normalize and you drift, then the rest of them won't make any sense to you because you'll already be drifting. Things which would have seemed abnormal to an earlier version of you will start to seem normal. Now, the point to start doing anything will never seem to come. You'll keep saying tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. In fact, you'll just be internally adjusting, adjusting, adjusting. And psychologically you become a different person. And then the final reason why that's lesson number one is political. If people don't take advantage of the moment they have in the first weeks, months and maybe at the outside the first year, if you don't do anything, then then the system changes and the cost of resistance become much, much higher. So right now, the little things that we do that would make a difference like looking people in the eye, subscribing to newspapers, making small talk, founding a neighborhood organization, running for local office, protesting, having political conversations like the one you and I are having at the moment, these things require just a tiny bit of courage, right? Not very much. But later, when these things start to become illegal or even dangerous, they require much more courage. So politically, you have to get out front and do these things. Even if you're not sure exactly what you're holding off. You have to do these things at the beginning. So yeah, I mean, I bring up these examples as you rightly, say, 1938 in Austria, because they really powerfully convey this dynamic. Hitler did not know that he could absorb Austrian a few days. He did it because of the messages he got from below. Austrian Jews did not know they were in such a position of threat. They found out because of how people reacted to the arrival of German force. These actions that the population chooses or doesn't choose to take at the beginning are really crucial to authoritarianism. It means that we have power. It also means that we have responsibility. It means that you don't have the option of doing nothing in America in spring of 2017. If you're doing nothing, you're actually doing something. If you're doing nothing, you're helping a regime change come about. So I want to flag the reaction that I know is occurring in some percentage of our listeners, which is that everything you just said, when mapped on to the present, sounds like a symptom of paranoia. Right. We're fundamentally not in the situation we just described, and we can remain somewhat agnostic about that. I can't name a person really now who is more critical of Trump than I am to some percentage of my listeners. I have completely lost my mind on this point. But I want to try to maintain what will be viewed as a less partisan line through this conversation, because everything you're saying here generically applies. Again, if not now, sometime this applies. And certainly you and I are going to be in large agreement about how much we should be taking seriously these concerns right now, given what has happened in the White House. But again, this is not even if you're a fan of Trump, these dynamics are in play potentially everywhere, all the time. No matter how stable your democracy seems, it's vulnerable to this kind of thing. So I want to move to .2, which is defend institutions. And you say that institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other, unless each is defended from the beginning. And then you use Nazi Germany as an example. And then you quote from an editorial that I had never read. I've read a lot about the Holocaust. I had never seen an editorial like this. And this was written in a newspaper for German Jews. And this is the editorial from the newspaper. This is the editorial's position. So imagine The New York Times writing an editorial like this in 1933, on the eve of the decade that would usher in the Final Solution. This is the perspective of German Jews in 1933. We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power that they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in Nazi newspapers. They will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. They cannot do. This because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check, and they clearly do not want to go down that road. When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one's better self and away from revisiting one's earlier oppositional posture. And then you say, such was the view of many reasonable people in 1933. Justice is the view of many reasonable people. Now, the mistake is to assume that rulers who come to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions, even when that is exactly what they've announced they will do. So this is just the phrase cautionary tale doesn't really do this moment justice. It's just amazing to put yourself in the position of people before the Holocaust was ever known to be possible, right before that kind of implosion of a very cosmopolitan society was. Thinkable before you could even dimly imagine that people would start marking places of business as Jewish owned, and that would be the precursor to your neighbors coming and seizing your property out of this kind of ecstasy of reappropriation of wealth based on tribal hatred. Anyway, talk about the defense of institutions. And again, this kind of natural myopia that people don't see that they're swimming in history. So let me start with history. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today, I'm speaking with Chris Voss. Chris is an expert in negotiation. He's the founder and principal of the Black Swan Group, which consults with Fortune 500 companies about negotiation. He also teaches at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and at Georgetown University School of Business. He's lectured at many leading institutions harvard, MIT, and Northwestern. And perhaps most relevant to our conversation today, he was a hostage negotiator for the FBI for many years. And we spend most of our time talking about his experience in the field there, negotiating with terrorists and ordinary hostage takers and bank robbers. And then he has distilled some of the lessons he's learned from those extreme conversations for more ordinary ones. And he's written a book on negotiation titled Never Split the Difference. Negotiating as if your life depended on it. And now, without further delay, I bring you Chris Voss. I am here with Chris Voss. Chris, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sam. My pleasure. Sorry I made it so hard getting all my tech set up. Not at all. It's amazing we can do this remotely. So let's just jump into your background because you have more than the usually fascinating background for a podcast guest. Thank you. How is it that you became a hostage negotiator? Okay. All right. So the pivot point in the FBI, because I was an FBI hostage negotiator, and you have to be an FBI agent first to be an FBI hostage negotiator. I was actually a member of the SWAT team. I was on SWAT FBI Pittsburgh, and I had a recurring knee injury, and I realized that there was only so many times they could put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I'd had my knee reconstructed for the second time. So then before I blew it out entirely, I thought, you know, I talk to people every day. How hard could it be to talk to terrorists? I could do that. Is this the usual path to becoming a hostage negotiator? Do they just draw from the ranks of existing law enforcement or, I guess for the FBI, anyone who's in the rank and file? Or do most people seek it out in a very deliberate way through a separate track? It's a little bit more that people seek it out after becoming whatever law enforcement agency they're in. I mean, every law enforcement agency has additional specialties that if you get into it, there might be something that attracts you, and they're kind of four basic specialties and four basic real different types. Negotiation is one of those. And you can be a hostage negotiator with the FBI. You can be a hostage negotiator with New York City Police Department. You got to be a law enforcement guy with that agency first, and then if you find it, if it finds you, whatever serendipity lines up, and hopefully it's your calling. And I originally thought SWAT was my calling, and thank God I hurt my knee because negotiation was better for me than SWAT ever was, and SWAT was great. How long were you a SWAT operator? Probably two years, roughly. I mean, I got on the Pittsburgh SWAT team, actually, before I'd actually gone through our SWAT school, but there was a lot of local training with the Pittsburgh team, and then plus, I'd been a cop before, so I was used to running around waving guns responsibly, as opposed to not paying attention to what you were doing. So I was a Pittsburgh SWAT for about a year and a half, two years. So you went from Pittsburgh SWAT to FBI SWAT or FBI Negotiation. Yeah. It's all confusing, right? All right, so Pittsburgh FBI office has its own office, and they got their own SWAT team. They got their own negotiation team, each field office. About 56 of them have their own teams, if you will. And I had gotten transferred to New York in the interim and then worked to get on the New York hostage team. And how many hostage negotiations were you involved in? Is this the kind of thing you keep count of? I would imagine it might be. Well, hey, yeah, not just on a bed post, right? Or on the belt or the totem pole or wherever you want to put it, but while I was in New York, I was involved in probably about, off the top of my head, three sieges of varying sizes. Fortunately for me, one of them was a bank robbery with hostages, which is really a really extremely unusual event. Happens in the movies all the time in real life, bank robberies where hostages are taken and negotiations subsequently ensue are very rare. Happens once every 20 years in New York City, about the same amount across the US. I mean, just rare. Usually the bank robbers get away first, right? So, yeah, I've been in one of those and a couple of some fugitives in a high rise in Harlem, smaller situation in upstate New York. So that was a fair amount, relatively speaking. Most negotiators don't get that many in an entire career. I got them in in just a couple of years. And then when I became a full time hostage negotiator at the FBI academy at Quantico, you know, we started working stuff right and left, and I probably worked counting the kidnappings I worked internationally, my rough guess is no less than 150 situations around the world. And can you generalize about the dynamics of a hostage negotiation, or do they change radically and maybe even totally invert depending on the context? Because I can imagine there are I'm kind of thinking in international terms here, where there are countries where they routinely take hostages as a kind of cottage industry where it's not routine to kill the hostages, and it's very routine to just negotiate until you get some economic completion. Whereas if ISIS is taking hostages now, we know all too well that it's very common to have them killed. What can you say about the different kinds of situations people are in? Yeah, great question. So domestic us. Contains situation inside a bank, inside somebody's house, inside an apartment in Harlem that resembles a family holiday dinner, terribly awry, lots of people upset past wrongs that other people have completely forgotten about being thrown on people's faces. Every year, there's a movie out about a holiday dinner at somebody's house, and with siblings mad at each other and parents trying to hold it all together. That's a little more common, contained situation, if you will. Very much as you observed, international kidnapping mostly as a commodities business commodity, cold heartedly, happens to be human beings. And there's perception in reality. Perception is people get killed all the time, even with ISIS reality, it's a financial transaction. ISIS, their commodity, was lots of different citizens, and they got what they could out of them, whether it be publicity or money. They get money for Western Europeans, they get publicity from Americans. But there's always a commodity there that challenges spotting what the commodity really is in any negotiation. Yeah, well, that's an interesting point, because with respect to international hostages, even with a group like ISIS, you have the effect of the different countries policies. We have a policy, if I'm not mistaken, that we don't pay ransom under any conditions. And there are a few well publicized cases where the US. Even made it illegal for the families to pay ransoms, whereas these Western European countries, many of them, routinely pay ransoms. And so you become a very unlucky hostage if you're the American among many Western Europeans. I don't know if that's changed at all. What is the current US. Policy with respect to negotiating and paying ransom for international hostages? Well, the US. Policy is all gray, and that's why it's been reported so many different ways in the media, and it was actually funneled back to the families improperly by the wrong US. Government officials. There was a bonehead, and I'm happy to say it was a bonehead at the National Security Council that was quoting it wrong the entire time. What nobody knew was that nobody from the Department of justice ever told the families it was illegal for them to pay ransom. And the Department of justice people responsible for prosecution, the National Security council Bozo was not responsible for prosecution and was ultimately essentially relieved of his position because he handled the family so badly. What does all that mean? What all that really means is the US. Doesn't make concessions and there's some real fine nuancing to that, but there is room to allow ransoms to be paid. But US. Government officials aren't always smart enough to know that the issue is what's the long term consequences as opposed to the short term expediency. And of course, there's the way the Europeans do it and they back up to the hostage takers strongholds with truckloads of money and dump it all out on them, which makes it far worse for the rest of the world. And that's what turned it into chaos. I mean, all the western European nations are famous for showing up with suitcases if not truckloads of money for hostages. And that's where things really get out of control. Yeah. So what should the policy be in your view? Because it's easy to see how we would be creating this industry by rewarding it so reflexively. And yet when you are in a specific situation where especially if it's your loved one who's hostage, you can imagine that there's just this moral and psychological imperative to just pay at any cost and you really don't care about the external effects of creating higher risk for other people in the future. What do you think? If we could get everyone on the same page with respect to how to treat these situations, everyone being all the relevant countries, what should people do? Well, the best analogy is the bank robbery analogy. We give bank tellers bait money and that way you give the bank robber a little bit of money, the money is marked and the bank robber gets his money and he leaves. I didn't even know that. Is this widely reported or I just haven't watched the right movies? All bank tellers have money that they can just hand over it. All bank tellers have bait money and every single one of them, and they're all trained bank robber comes in a bank, you reach for the bait money, you hand them that money. It's not worth losing the life of a bank teller over a couple of hundred, few thousand dollars. So you save the bank teller's life. The bank robber gets some of what he came in for. He's scared, he's rattled. He just wants to take some money. Take the money and run. He gets the money and run. Now the bait money is marked. So the great thing about that is there's probably an exploding die pack inside the bait money and as soon as the bank robber steps out, it goes pout poof and it puts all sorts of green dial over the bank robber. But even if the diapac doesn't go off and he goes back to his hideout and he splits the money up among his co conspirators who didn't go to the bank money is ridiculously easy to trace. Insanely easy to trace. How is that? I can't picture how it would be easy to yeah, it's only in the serial numbers. And those of us that aren't in the business of tracing money, we figure it's complicated because we don't keep close track of our money. But ever since the US. Watergate days, the refrain was follow the money. Well, it's follow the money because the money is insanely easy to follow. You can follow it back. You can find out who else had the money. It actually is a great way to round up the entire gang instead of just the guy that they thought was expendable enough to send into the bank to get the money for everybody else. So you can round up the whole gang if you follow the money. And that's really where it comes down to. There was a kidnapping in Ecuador in about 2000. The first time. The US. Government tried this. This kidnapping gang had been hitting oil platforms every year around October and had been getting away with money because there's insurance money for kidnapping. And the third time they hit it, unfortunately, an American was executed. But then the US government decided, like, all right, so we're going to get behind this payment and we're going to follow the money. And what ended up happening, because it only takes about five or six guys to conduct the kidnapping. Well, they made the payment. They followed the money. They rounded up 50 people, and they shut down the entire kidnapping gang. And they never executed another kidnapping. They never killed another person. This is the first time the entire organization had ever been taken down. It was incredibly successful. Now, they didn't get all the money back, but what they did was save countless lives on down the line by following the money and taking out the entire gang of 50 instead of maybe taking five. Had they gone on a rescue, maybe they'd have gotten three, four, five kidnappers. The rest of them would have gotten away. A lot of hostages would have got killed. The long term solution is to be smarter than the bad guys, and that's the way you're smarter than the bad guys. Walk me back to the analogy from bank robbing to other hostage situations. So what should be the international policy with respect to terrorist organizations? Well, first of all, you go ahead and engage in the conversation. The US policy actually is explicitly stated these days that we shouldn't be afraid to communicate with anybody. We should deal. John F. Kennedy line, you should never be afraid to negotiate. Never negotiate out of fear, but never be afraid to negotiate. So communicate. The communication process becomes an intelligence gathering process. You generate a lot of information. You learn a lot about them. You learn you profile them. You learn their tendencies. They tell you who they are inadvertently by their word choice. You can narrow down where they're from, how old they are, where they grew up by the choices of words. And you talk to multiple people on the other side. You gather a massive amount of information. You actually give yourself a better chance to conduct a rescue if you engage in communication. Then if you get into some bargaining, you bargain them down. They want some money. They want to take the money and run. You find a way to make the delivery. You gather information over the delivery. You find out about how they pick up money, where they go, what they do with it. You follow the money, and you follow them back to their hideout. You trace the money. You find out where they're buying weapons. You find out where they're buying bandages. You find out where they're buying beer, whatever they're buying, who are they doing business with, what's the illegal markets they're spending their money in because they're buying weapons someplace. You want to know who they're buying them from. You trace all the money. You do a couple of month investigation. You not only bring the kidnappers to justice, but you bring justice to their colleagues that have been supporting them also. It's long term. It requires patience, and it works. But how does one trace money in these kinds of transactions? For instance, I just walked into a market and used a $20 bill. Had I gotten that from a bank robbery, I can only imagine that just disappears into the economy without a trace. That's what you imagine. And that's why I'm a bad bank robber. The guys that do white collar round all these people up I mean, the greatest investigations in the world, that Al Capone was taken down by a white collar investigation following the money. Watergate was unraveled by following the money. Our brothers and sisters in forensic accounting work magic on following the money. The rest of us think it disappears into oblivion when we walk into a 711 and drop a $20 bill. And that is not the case. But how is it getting tracked when the 711 sends their cash to the bank? It gets scanned as coming from the 711. All right, so you want me to reveal to the bad guys right now we're tracking their money? Well, I'm not going to do that. I'll let you judge what's prudent here, but it is interesting. So we have different situations here. You talked about the highly personal hostage situation. I mean, just a boyfriend taking his girlfriend hostage. This is clearly a situation born of real emotional distress. And I could imagine that has a very different character than the routine hostage taking overseas done by people who do this all the time as a business. Do they require radically different approaches, or can you generalize about the commonalities between those situations? It's a great question, and the answer is every hostage negotiation team in the world and every situation that they approach, whether it be contained, emotional, or transactional kidnapping, they all use the exact same eight skills. Now, the commonality is there's going to be an emotion, and there aren't that many emotions now. It's either going to be anger, it's going to be greed. It's going to be excitement. It's going to be a sense of loss. It's going to be a fear of loss. Daniel Conneman, who won the Nobel Prize in behavioral economics, said that human beings around the planet, regardless of situation, are most driven by fear of loss. Not exclusively, of course, but most driven by fear of loss. So this encompasses human behavior. It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's a kidnapping, whether it's a bank robbery, whether it's a business transaction. So human beings have the same basic set of emotions, and they're all driven from the caveman days by the same survival instincts and fear of loss. Fear of loss is the biggest single driver of human behavior globally. And I mean globally by age, gender, ethnicity, or globally in terms of situations. So you start with those rules, and then you begin to look for commonalities. You start to find them really quick, regardless of whether or not it's a bank or it's a kidnapping. Well, we'll get into the general principles that you've extracted here in a minute, and these don't just apply to hostage negotiations, but to negotiations of any type. But let's just talk about your experience in the trenches here a little bit more. Are there any negotiations that stand out for you as far as having taught you the most or having been the most intense or impactful on you? Well, yeah, kind of. Try to learn from all of them, but let's go to the bank robbery first. Bank robbery with hostages. Chase Manhattan Bank. The ringleader in that group was a ridiculously controlling guy, interestingly enough. Right on. You call into a bank, you expect the bank robbers to be upset, concerned. He actually said to the NYPD negotiator who was the first negotiator on the phone with him, he literally says to him, I'm the calmest one here. He was a really manipulative guy. Crazily enough. He exhibited the same negotiation approaches as a really smart CEO. He tried to diminish his influence, how influential he looked on the phone when he was talking on the phone with us, he was saying, yeah, it's not up to me. There's a lot of other guys here, and they're more dangerous than I am. They're the unreasonable ones. He was in love with plural pronouns. What's the guy who's in love with plural pronouns going to do? He's trying to hide his influence, he or she, so that you don't put him down at the table. And this is what this guy did in the bank. By the time I got onto the phone with him, I used a hostage negotiation technique that we referred to as mirroring, which is just repeating what someone has said kind of word for word because he said stuff that startled me. And it's a great verbal reflex when you're caught off guard, and it buys you a lot of time. And the other side ends up just blurting stuff out that they wouldn't blurt out otherwise. When I mirrored this guy because I was asking him about the getaway van and he said, we don't have one van. I said, you don't have one van? He said, we have more than one van. I said, you have more than one van? He said yeah. Will you chase my driver away? Now, what he did when he said, you chased my driver away he just roped in a third guy that we didn't even know was involved in a bank robbery, which is he was so controlled, he involuntarily blurted out admissions of guilt not just on him, but on other people. And we ended up rounding up the whole gang. Everybody surrendered. Took about 12 hours from start to finish, which is kind of par for the course when you begin to understand a profile of situations, if you will. And I learned a lot from that. Once he realized that he'd voluntarily given us stuff that he wished he hadn't said he actually handed off the phone to another guy. The controlling negotiator will get flustered. They'll get frustrated, but they won't get angry in a way that damages the situation. He got so frustrated and flustered, he just handed off the phone to his colleague who had been manipulated into the situation. I got that guy who surrendered to me in about 90 minutes. He met me outside the bank, and when he came out, he admitted to everything that was going on, told us who was inside and what was going on. Then it was just a matter of time for us to continue to work our process and get everybody out of line. So is it common in these situations that you're able to exploit different levels of commitment or different goals on the part of the people involved? The hostage takers? Yeah, it's real common. And you start out just sort of feeling your way through the situation, looking gently for whatever thread you could get. And then with a gentle sort of patient approach, you can unravel a situation really easily. And it works. I mean, it just works consistently. And if you work the process, you'll actually negotiate through the entire situation with patients faster than you will by being in a hurry. There were a few cases in your book where you essentially give the blow by blow for some of these negotiations where it's a family who is in the loop with, I guess, the FBI in this case, and you're trying to negotiate the price down. This is not a bank robbery, but some international hostage kidnapping. Kidnapping, yeah. In a situation where the initial demand is so sky high that no one involved could possibly pay it, I sort of understand it. But at a certain point, it must begin to seem unethical to be driving a hard bargain in dialogue with someone who is threatening to kill or dismember your loved one. What is the point of, you know, when you, you know, get it down to whatever it is, $50,000 that the family can pay to be driving it? Lower than that. Some of these negotiations that you detailed continued past the point where I thought, okay, this seems like it's just raising the risk to the hostage. Yeah. Great questions. And so the issues of ethics and morality. Any negotiations? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Douglas Murray. Douglas is an associate editor at The Spectator, and he writes for many other publications, including The Sunday Times, Standpoint, and The Wall Street Journal. He's also given talks at both the British and European Parliaments and at the White House. And he's most recently the author of a wonderful book titled the Strange Death of Europe immigration, Identity, Islam. And if you don't know him, Douglas is a truly wonderful debater. I recommend you check out more or less anything you can find from him on YouTube. Douglas and I spend a lot of time in this podcast, certainly most of the time, talking about the situation in Europe with respect to immigration and Islam and the social attitudes in the Muslim community that are at odds with values that really should be really must be non negotiable, like free speech and women's rights and gay rights. And what I'd like to point out is that neither of us are against immigration, and you might not notice that in the first hour or so. And we're not against Muslim immigration. In fact, both of us count among our friends, Muslims and former Muslims who are precisely the sorts of people we are most concerned to protect. And in particular, we're worried about protecting them from many of the illiberal people who have been pouring into Europe. I know there are some things that Douglas and I disagree about. I think we have a different sense of the place of Christianity as a foundation of Western values. I don't give it much of a place at all, certainly not a contemporary one, and Douglas does. But we'll tackle that in another podcast. In this one, we more or less fully agree on what we're against, and what we're against is Western civilization committing suicide. And if you think that puts the matter too strongly, you haven't read Douglas's book, and you probably haven't been paying much attention to what's been happening in Europe. And if you think one has to be a fan of Trump in order to worry about this, well, then you haven't been paying attention to this podcast. But on the topic of Trump, trump just gave a speech in Poland where he said, and I quote, the fundamental question of our time is whether the west has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert or destroy it? End quote. And while I find abundant fault with the messenger, as you know, I can't find fault with that particular message. And the fact that liberals can't seem to see what's at stake here, the fact that they are embarrassed to defend, quote, Western values as though that were synonymous with racism or the legacy of colonialism or xenophobia or a lack of compassion that is making liberalism politically defunct at this point. And that increasingly worries me. And happily, in the United States, we are in a better situation demographically and with respect to immigration and just geographically, and that has implications for immigration. But one cannot be cheerful about what's been happening in Europe. And in his book and in this conversation, douglas finds a path through this wilderness of competing concerns that is deeply ethical and also deeply pragmatic. I don't think Trump comes up, or if he does, it's just in passing. So consider yourself spared. But Douglas and I get into the fairly gloomy thesis of his very witty book, which is that what's happening in Europe is something that not even the most paranoid people would have predicted a decade ago. And it concerns all of us. And now I give you Douglas Murray. I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure to be with you. It's been, what, almost two years? Yeah, I have actually I haven't checked, but it was we last spoke when the refugee crisis in Europe was getting its most press here in the in the US. I know it had been going on for years before that, unremarked more or less here, but we spoke about immigration and all of its attendant problems and we will cover some of the same ground again because you've written this great and harrowing book on the topic. But first, congratulations on the book. It seems well launched and it's a fantastic book. Well, thank you. It's very kind. It's just really a beautiful read. And it's grim, don't get me wrong, there's not a lot of hope in the book, but it's very funny. Your style of approaching this is rather than be hectoring and communicating a sustained sense of emergency, you become quite ironic, and I recommend people pick it up simply to be amused in addition to being terrified. That's a fine combination of feeling. It's all too rare. Now, you've painted a picture of certainly the possible destruction of Europe, and I would say even the likely destruction of Europe. You can walk me back from the cliff's edge if you think I'm being too pessimistic over the course of this hour, but it's hard to feel hopeful that this will turn out well. And at the center of this you paint a picture of really a morally exhausted civilization and one that is certain of absolutely nothing apart from the fact that it has no right to think itself better than any other civilization. So I guess we could just start with kind of the nihilism and self doubt at the core of this problem. No. The book is called The Strange Death of Europe with the subtitle immigration identity islam. And, I mean, I've been thinking about and writing about these areas and researching them for a very long time now. And it was during the 2015 crisis that the migrant crisis, refugee crisis that I sort of realized this was the epitome of everything that had been going on. And the core thing really was two things. One was the mass movements of people into Europe in a sped up form of something that's been going on for decades. And the second was the fact that this would be happening at the time that, in my view, Europe has lost any faith in itself for its own right to continue, particularly in a recognizable form. And I think the combination of these two factors is pretty hard to see how this ends well, but I constantly throughout the book try to show that it's not the case, that there's no argument for, for instance, Angela Merkel Opening the Doors. It's not as if there's no understandable reason or no justification for Europeans feeling the way they do about their history or the way in which we feel towards our past and the way in which we therefore feel in the present. And I'm trying to explain this because it's something we all feel. To my mind at any rate, something like this crisis goes down the middle of all of us. There are people on the left who say, Let everyone in. There are some people on the right who say very few, but some people let them drown. I think these are people who are peddling fantasies, albeit very dark and grim fantasies, but they're not things that most of us could possibly think. And so therefore, what I'm trying to do is to lay out what is what we're really facing in all its grim complexity and amusement. I think you find that the middle line there wonderfully. As you point out in the book, this really, for the most part, isn't a contest between good and evil. This is a contest between competing virtues. And I think you put it in terms of justice and mercy. Yes. And that's not often remarked on because each side is so busy painting the other as heartless or insane. Yes. This is one of the things I felt so strongly in recent years and which we've all come across some symptoms of or demonstrations of. But to my mind, this is what we should do with all these sort of complex issues. I had strong feelings that we were doing something suicidal in Europe. But I knew also that I had to go and look this in the face. I had to see it at its hardest. I had to go, as I did, to the reception ports of southern Europe, of the Italian and Greek islands, and speak to the people who literally just got off the boats, to see the boats coming in, to hear the stories of the people coming from all over Africa, North Africa, sub Saharan Africa, the Middle East, the Far East. People from as far away as Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and I had to hear their stories as well as hearing from speaking to people in the Chancellor's of Europe and so on. And the reason for this was, as you mentioned, is this thing that we are very used, sadly, in all of our political discussion to discussions that basically I'm Churchill your Hitler or I'm Churchill your Chamberlain, and I'm good, you're a Nazi. And it's my view that on something like the migration crisis, it's only possible to see it in terms of competing virtues. I take it from Aristotle that there are sometimes things that are two goods, two virtues colliding, and that this was such a time when, as I say, the desire to be generous to the world ends up, in my view, overriding what should be a sense of justice for the people of Europe. Well, I want to talk about the ethics of immigration in a few minutes, because I think it is a nontrivial ethical and even psychological problem to figure out what one thinks about this and how one can be justified in having a position here that isn't a suicide pact, essentially. But I want us to illustrate the suicide pact because the details are surprising. Some of what you describe as fairly predictable, it's of a piece with the masochism and self doubt. That postmodernism has spread really to the limits of culture, so people will be familiar with some of the details, but there are some things that have happened that actually seem impossible. And to even speak about these events, I feel like I'm trafficking in lies and conspiracy theories, even to speak of them, they're so incredible to me. This is one of those topics where we have to measure more or less every sentence against our listeners capacity to wonder whether or not we have our facts wrong or we've lost our minds. And so I want to start the conversation with one of these extreme cases known as the Rotherham scandal. First of all, this is not, as far as I can tell, well known at all in the US. I think one of the reasons why it has been underreported is that it just sounds incredible and the lack of credibility seems to rub off on anyone who would talk about it. So I just want our listeners to be prepared who haven't heard this story, that in a few moments you're going to wonder whether I'm talking to an Alex Jones character or some other nutcase, I can say. Unfortunately, I'm not. So, Douglas, just take a couple of minutes to describe what happened in Rotherham. Sure. I mean, the context of this is that I try to explain that absolutely everything that happened in the post war period in Europe in terms of migration was not expected by anybody at all, really, and particularly not anybody in charge politically. And I say that because in 2010, Angela Merkel gave a famous at the time speech and pot storm in which she famously said that multiculturalism had failed and went on to say that it failed utterly and that particularly she said the people who came after the war, in case of Germany. The guest workers, mainly from Turkey, she said. We expected them to go home. And they didn't. Well, of course they didn't. Looking back, why would you, if you were leaving a poor developing country and had landed in a developed country, and why would you not then bring your wife? And why would you, if you were with your wife, not have children? And why would your children not go to the local school? And so on and so forth. But it's just at a peace with everything that wasn't expected. And one of the things I say in the book when charting out the sort of brief history of this period in postwar European migration, is that we we got to a stage, the so called multicultural era, where we became good at talking about the good sides of it. I mean, at the at the lowest, most sort of frivolous end, but actually very common, talking about cuisine, for instance, the benefits we had in cuisine terms. And I mean, you know, it's understandable. Who would want to go back to the British food of the 1950s? But it was also that the negatives, anything bad at all started to become impossible to say because it was as if that might speak to the whole. Now, the most visceral and terrible example of this inability to talk to the bad things that happened emerged in different countries at different times. And in my telling, it emerged really first in the UK, and that was the scandal that subsequently became known as the Rotherham Scandal. This was in the first decade of this century. I became aware of it and other journalists did, because two groups of people really started to mention it. One were Sikh groups and others in the north of England who complained that where girls from their community were being trafficked by Muslim men. And the other was that it started to become a focal point for some far right elements in the UK. That is particularly and this was at a time when the British National Party, which is really a truly racist neo Nazi party, it's now, thank goodness, pretty much moribund, but for a moment, they got almost a million votes in the UK. And there were two, to our shame, there were two members of the European Parliament for the British National Party and they made enormous headway with this, or tried to. And this was around 2004 and at the time there was actually a Channel Four documentary that was meant to because some, you know, finally some journalists took a real interest in this. And Channel Four was meant to broadcast a documentary about this, what became known as the Grooming Gang Scandal. And it was actually stopped from broadcasting at the request of local police, among others who feared that it would be a recruiting sergeant for the British National Party at forthcoming elections. So the documentary was canceled. It was subsequently shown after elections and at a time that was deemed to be less volatile. But that episode spoke to a sort of general issue, which was that people really didn't want to know about these stories. Largely, it was thought, these were events that were happening in northern towns outside the sort of metropolitan London bubble, and so they were easier to ignore for a lot of people. But within the last decade, it became increasingly hard to ignore it. And eventually the government set up an official inquiry into what went wrong. And it turned out that in the town of Rotherham alone, up to 1400 young girls had been systematically groomed and raped, often gang raped, by gangs of Muslim men, largely of Pakistani origin. And the official inquiry into this, the government inquiry, found that the fear of accusations of racism as it were, penetrated and prevented the police and local authorities acting on this, even when the local outcry was really very, very strong indeed. And it gets worse because unfortunately, as we all know, like the Catholic Church rate scandals and with all sorts of other similar cases, sadly, what happens is the first story breaks and then you learn the depth and width of the problem. And this in the last few years, it's turned out that there were similar cases in towns across the north of England and in places that people thought to be more leafy and green. In Oxfordshire, most people think Oxford, dreaming spires, et cetera, et cetera. In Oxfordshire, there was a case five years ago now that came to trial, the Operation Bullfinch case, where numerous young white girls, again, often underage, have been trafficked for sex by Muslim gangs. And I mean, the details that came out of that trial at the Old Bailey in London included, for instance, that one of the men branded one of the girls on her backside, I think with an M for Mohammed, which was his name, he branded her as his property. And again, these cases, when they came to trial, they just for the reasons that you and I feel awkward talking about it, the British state, the British people, felt awkward and wanted them not to be true. But this was just the same story in a way that then later emerged after I mean, much faster between being covered up and coming out, but of similar events at, for instance, music festivals in Sweden in recent years. Where it wasn't until Cologne on New Year's Eve, 2015. That when the large scale assaults happened, famously in front of the cathedral on New Year's Eve. That that. Then the Swedes, this sort of having reported that, turned round and some of the press said, oh yeah, didn't that happen at our music festivals in recent years? And oh, yeah, that did. So it's a real scandal and it's an ongoing scandal. There are still many cases coming to trial. I think there's a lot more to find out. But it is just a symbol, a symptomatic example of this deep, deep discomfort of this whole discussion. Because if you or I had been asked to invent a sort of gross, racist sort of favorite trope, it would be, well, they'd complain about people coming over here and raping our women. And I think that's one of the reasons that it's been so little covered. I have a friend who's a journalist who mentioned to me just a few days ago that he went to interview some of the victims in rather image and he said he thought by now, as it were, their stories. They'd be talked out about their stories, they've been interviewed so many times. Not so these women now, even now, have basically not had a chance to tell their story to the press or anyone else because people just really don't want to know this stuff. And one of the points in my book is that everyone knows the benefits of some migration, but the downside bits are we're still not really willing to face up to. And that is it at its absolute most base and worst. Again, this story just puts me at the absolute limit of what I find believable the fact that this happened. I'm thinking now specifically about Rotherham, the numbers of people in this small town and the parents having to appeal to the police for years and nothing comes of it, right? The fact that the authorities stood by and let this happen year after year. There are so many I mean, I'd test your listeners patients if I gave too many examples. But let me give you an example from the Oxfordshire case I mentioned, which is sort of in the UK, it's less well known than Roblum, which has become really well known in the UK. But in the Oxfordshire case there was a girl who because quite often the young girls were bribed with drugs and things, or plied with drugs and alcohol and so on. There's one case of a girl who was actually in a care home in Oxford and she was being gang raped and she managed to escape and she got back to the children's home she was in, meant to be being looked after by local authorities. And she didn't have the money for the taxi that she had managed to hail to get her back to the care home. And the care home staff thought that she was just playing up, as it were. The taxi driver took her back and she was gang raped. Again, it's sort of wholesale failure of I think this is why it particularly has begun to, or at least has for time. Some people really speak to a greater failing because we'd like to think, I think that young people, particularly young people in trouble in care homes and things, are actually the people the state should most look after and care for, and that at that stage, there's such a total lack of care that you could end up basically facilitating. That is, I think, horrifying. Well, yeah, and facilitating it at a certain point, knowingly the thing that the situation you just described is a horrible misunderstanding on some level. But when you have the police knowing what's happening, but being unwilling to investigate for fear of being perceived as racist. Right, yeah. By the way, the interesting thing is some of your listeners may not know the background, but this also speaks to a fascinating thing, again, which doesn't come from nowhere. The police didn't have that fear for no reason. In the 1990s, the early 90s, there was a famous racist murder in Britain of a black teenager called Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered on the streets and his killers weren't brought to trial for a very long time. And one of the failings, undoubtedly in the Lawrence case was the presumption by the police that it had been a black on black gang murder. And this was encouraged by various people, this perception. And when there was a report in the late 90s into this, the McPherson report it was called, it found that the local police and the police and UK general were, quote, institutionally racist. And this label was certainly, I would have said, accurate in some cases. I think it was far too broad a claim to make about the British police as a whole. But it meant that in the years immediately afterwards, the police in Britain would have been even more adamant than they would have been for not to tread onto things that, you know, would would embed that or take them back to having that reputational problem again. So all these things are problems built on problems. Yeah. What is illustrative and perhaps even diagnostic about this case for me is that and again, it really strains credulity on every level is that the fact that it's possible, the fact that you have really a whole society being willing to just eat this horror year after year and do nothing about it, that suggests to me that other things are possible. And this kind of great unraveling that you sound like a scaremonger to worry about is possible. What freedom wouldn't you be willing to forfeit if you're willing to let your daughters and your neighbor's daughters by the thousands get gang raped for years, it absolutely beggars belief. Another example was that during the same period that the Rotherham scandal was starting to break was when the British police admitted that there had been certainly some scores of murders in the UK, which had almost certainly been so called honor murders, honor crimes which the police hadn't really bothered to investigate because they were community matters, right? I mean, it's all a part of a stumbling for a period which, as I say in the book, we were just having to improvise during. Yeah. And the interesting wrinkle here that we'll get to, and this is will be quite familiar to our listeners, but that the hypocrisy here on the left is fairly breathtaking because you have the same people who are most concerned about women's rights and gay rights, and even, as you describe, even more niche concerns. Now, transgender rights and getting your pronouns straight, these are the kind of the highest moral priorities at this moment. These are the very people who seem quite happy to import millions of people into their society for whom the very notion of women's rights and gay rights, and to say nothing of transgender rights, is not only foreign but anathema. There's a double thing here that everyone is paying a massive penalty for. And this is a point you also make in the book when you look at the most vulnerable people in these immigrant communities, the liberal Muslims and the gay Muslims and the apostates and the Muslim reformers, the people who threaten their lives, right? Who make their lives an actual safety concern from one moment to the next are not, by and large, the fascists and the neo Nazis and the bigots and the xenophobes. It's the intolerant Muslims who are being brought into the same community. It's the subject that's incredibly disheartening, because it suggests that there are many other things going on, doesn't it? I mean, it suggests, for instance, that there are people who are perfectly willing to COVID up atrocity, really, in order that their own community doesn't have any negative publicity by the normal in most communities. I think that you don't want your dirty linen, as it were, washed in public, but there's obviously a greater tolerance of that going on. You might think that a small amount of embarrassment might be not worth airing in public, but considerable numbers of gang rapes might be serious enough to actually think it's worth having it out. And then there is the, to my mind, supplemental problem, in a way, of the people who basically think that this is a story about white working class girls and they don't find much sympathy for them, to put it at its strongest. By the way, it's a very slightly analogous but example, but I was following with great interest the case of this American student who died last week, who was brutalized in North Korea after trying to take down a post Otto Warmbier. The bit of this whole horrible story that, in a way, was most striking was not as if the North Korean authorities behaved differently than one would expect, but that there was this glee on parts of the left, on huffington Post and Salon and so on when he got arrested and detained and then brutalized and tortured and beaten, as it turned out, to death because he was a sort of beneficiary of white privilege and ha ha. It was both Huffington Post and Salon. Ha ha. He's just learnt the limits of white privilege and he's just thinking, how much sickness do you have to have as a human being to respond to these stories with this kind of political reflex that actually I mean, overrides? All humanity. And that's really, I think, one of the less spoken about things in this whole Rotherham sort of thing was this kind of these are white, working class trash, not people I know sort of thing, and therefore not deserving of your pity or concern even. Yeah. That's especially odious when you reflect on the fact that some of these girls were as young as eleven. Right. Yeah, it is mind boggling. I did, I saw that piece and I think it was the Huffington Post on the North Korea incident and it is yeah, the idea that his white privilege caused him to think that he could tear down a propaganda poster with impunity and that he got his just desserts for that sort of arrogance. It is wrecking of one's hopes for humanity to see that sentiment even articulated. I want to talk a minute about the ethics of immigration because this is the other side of the equation. They felt moral imperative, which I certainly feel to respond generously to the unluckiest people on earth. This really comes to the moral indefensibility of good luck. Right. When I search my mind I can't find any way to argue that I deserve my good luck. I'm extraordinarily lucky. And among the many reasons I could list, one that comes to mind is I'm extraordinarily lucky not to have been born a woman in Afghanistan. Now to what can I ascribe that good luck? Well, it's just pure good luck. I didn't earn it. There's nothing I imagine I did in my past life or in utero to earn that good luck. And so when I think of the unlucky people who happen to be women in Afghanistan or in really anyone in Syria at the moment, I can't justify this ethical disparity. This is just the sheer fact of the matter that I I seem to have emerged in part of the world where I was simply given citizenship and where good luck and opportunity just more or less grows on trees. And you have millions of people born elsewhere into circumstances that are about as pointlessly wretched as any in human history. So. The question is, how does one live a moral life in light of this kind of disparity? And how do we build societies in light of this fact that good luck has not been spread equally over the surface of the Earth and societies that are organized around a moral vision that we can defend? And I'm happy to have you give your answer to that question, but it clearly can't be. This is the answer that I think we want to close the door to, and this is an answer that some people have tried to defend. It can't be that we have a moral obligation to let as many people as possible move into our society in such numbers that it becomes scarcely better than the societies they're leaving. Right? It can't be from some kind of principle of osmosis, which just creates the lowest common denominator of all possible fates on Earth. And that's something that is defended by essentially someone like Mario Namazi, who I had on the podcast, to the absolute frustration of every listener, the problem of open borders. Perhaps you want to touch it, but it seems to me that can't be a solution at some point. You are regulating the flow at a minimum. Yes, of course. I'm so glad you framed in those terms because that's obviously how most decent people in the west feel these days. I mean, we don't feel that we've not only won the lottery of life, but deserve it. We know that it's luck. We all have friends who or most of us have friends who have been born without some of that luck and have acquired it. That also makes us feel more aware of the luck and more unable to explain what we should do and why we should keep anyone else out from sharing it. And I think that one of the bits that is least focused in on all this is the long term point, and it's one you touched on there about the open border thing. For short term reasons, one could understand why we have the views we do for long term reasons. It's inexplicable that, for instance, you would think that you could import, as Angela Merkel did in 2015 alone, an extra up to 2% of the population in a single year and for it not to have long term effects. I recount towards the end of my book a conversation with a great supporter of Angela Merkel's in The German Bundes Targ, and it made me hit on one of the thoughts which I express in the book about this. Which is that we seem to think at this stage in our liberal democracies that our liberal democracies are so appealing and so strong that basically, if you bring the world in, it comes up to speed with us almost immediately. Or the same one point in the book that to just walk into Europe is to immediately breathe the air of St Paul and Voltaire. And it seems highly unlikely to me to put it no stronger, that everybody who walks into Europe arrives at the same point that we are at in regards to our views on religion, our views on all sorts of rights questions and others. It's just very implausible to me. But then the idea that changes, and to me at any rate, I say that we should understand our societies to be more like a fragile ecosystem where you can't just endlessly tear things up and put new things in and expect the whole thing to look the same. It's much more likely that it will look very different and that therefore you should take care with it and take care with the thing you've inherited in order that you pass it on. At least you pass on something that isn't a grand version of the Balkans. And that brings me to the other analogy, which I at one point hit on. Some people would find it uncomfortable because, of course, so many of the people coming into Europe come on boats, and so many of the boats, thanks to the smugglers, are very rickety vehicles indeed. But I say, what if Europe is not this massive liner that can just keep taking people on, but a boat itself which has to decide how many people it can take on before it itself capsizes? And I think that this is something we have not given sufficient thought to. And of course, one of the reasons is that it isn't a science, is it? I mean, it's not as if there was a graph one could produce to show the point at which people become uncomfortable about where their society is going, the point at which the welfare stretch is too great, et cetera, et cetera. It's just something you get feelings about. And that's why I have one chapter on what I call early warning sirens. Various people who went off across Europe in recent decades, different people, left wing feminists there, a gay activist there, and the people who just went off saying, hang on, I'm starting to get nervous about the future. And again, we didn't really listen to those because we kept on to this idea that it doesn't matter, because when people get to hear, they'll realize how great it is and they'll become just like us. This intuition is also propped up by arguments in favor of immigration that you dispatch fairly early in the book. And there really is really a set of myths in at least on certain points, about immigration, aging, society and all that. Yeah, perhaps take a minute or two to talk to those, because people have this sense that this is not only in some sense inevitable, but necessary. There's no alternative for Europe. You have this senescent continent that needs workers. What else could be done? Yes, I go into that. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content. It 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, well, today I'm speaking with Ian McGilchrist. Ian is a Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and he was a Research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins. And most importantly for our purposes, he's the author of the book The Master and His Emissary the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. And that is the focus of our conversation today. We talk about the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, which are fascinating and consequential and I think under appreciated. And this gets us into many thorny issues. We discuss the popular misconceptions about these differences. The prospect that consciousness might be partitioned even in an intact brain. The difference between consciousness and attention. The boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. How face to face encounters differ between the hemispheres. The unique deficits that result from damage to each the ascendancy of the left hemisphere in modern culture. The possibility of the brain as a mere receiver of mind. People's expectations about surviving death. Anyway, I thought it was a fascinating conversation. We certainly could have gone on for many more hours. And now I bring you Ian McGilchrist. I am here with Ian McGilchrist. Ian, thank you for joining me. It's a great pleasure, Sam. Thank you. So we're about to speak about what I consider one of the most interesting topics in any field. The focus of our conversation is covered really in exhaustive detail in your book The Master and His Emissary. And there's also a film based on that which I discovered online last night, The Divided Brain. But before we jump in, what is your academic and intellectual background? All my life, really, I've been interested in philosophical questions, particularly the end of philosophy that accommodates theology. And so at 18, I wanted to go to Oxford and study philosophy and theology, but you had to take an entrance exam in some school subject, and almost at random, I chose English Literature. And when I went to interview, they said, oh, you can't do theology and philosophy. It's not an honors degree. So in 172 in Oxford, theology and philosophy wasn't an honest degree. Each on their own was, but not the combination I think it is now, but there we are. So they said, look, you obviously like and are good at English. Come and do that. So I did. And I was interested really in the philosophy of literature and the philosophy of aesthetics, in a way. And something struck me as very odd about what we were doing. I got a fellowship immediately after graduating which enabled me to have time to reflect. And I thought there's something that's really troubling me about the way in which we approach literature. Somebody in the past took great pains to create something that is unique, embodied and largely speaking implicit. In other words, if you try and unpack it like explaining a joke or trying to say, well, this is what this poem means, you really are losing a lot of the value and the meaning. And people came along, you know, in seminar rooms and took the disembodied and made it thoroughly sorry, took the embodied and made it thoroughly disembodied, took the implicit and made it explicit and in the process rendered this entirely unique thing, this completely unique experience, something that was utterly general in nature. So I thought, there's something wrong with this. And I wrote a book called Against Criticism. And what seemed to me wrong was that we'd become very disembodied in the way that we think about everything. In fact, it's something since the earliest days reflected on the way we lead our lives nowadays that they're overseerable in some way and that the process is somewhat destructive. It has its advantages, but it also has major problems. And I went to the philosophy seminars to discuss the mind body question, but I found that the philosophers were just altogether too disembodied in their approach. And so I thought I'd read Oliver Saxon's book Awakenings had just come out around that time. I'm that old. And I thought, this is really fascinating. Here's someone who's attended to the individuality of his patients but made completely amazing drawn philosophical conclusions. They're very important about what happens when something changes your brain or your body and what that does to your personhood, to your mind, and to your whole humanity. And I thought, this is what I want to do. So I had to start again, study medicine from scratch, and then as soon as I qualified and done my basic jobs in what you'd call internships, I then did a little bit of psychiatry and sorry, a bit of neurology and neurosurgery and then went to the Maudsley to study psychiatry. And my interest there has all along been in the overlap between mind and body. So that's how I got into being somebody who writes about the mind body relationship from an embodied point of view. There's a further question how did I get into the issue of lateralization, but you may be coming on to that, so we can yes. Have you had a psychiatric practice all this time, or are you retired in that mode? Oh, I'm retired now, but for years I was a practicing psychiatrist, first at the Bethlehem and Mortality Hospital in London and then privately. Right. So we're going to talk about the divided brain, which is something I've spoken about before, I think, at least in passing on my podcast and on my app, Waking Up. I've certainly written about it in at least one of my books. But given its strangeness as a phenomenon and its relevance to just how we conceive of ourselves as persons, it's an underreported finding in science. So I think we should just describe the phenomenon itself, how we've come to know anything about it. The basic picture is that the human brain and, you know, not just human this is true of the avian brain and all mammalian brains, but for our purposes, and most interestingly, our own brains are divided across the longitudinal fissure into left and right hemispheres. And this could have worked out in various ways. The two hemispheres could have been functionally identical. They could have shared information perfectly. There could be no differences between them. And one would sort of think that would be the case. And yet what we have found is that they are quite different. And we're going to go into those differences. And we know this based on the fact that they can be disconnected. So maybe we should actually, before we dive into the splitbrain phenomenon and how we know any of this stuff, just explain the title of your book that The Master and His Emissary. What what do you mean by that title? Okay, well, that's essentially a story which illustrates how I see the relationship between the two hemispheres. Here we are kind of jumping ahead a bit, but there's been a general view, the one that I was trained on, that the left hemisphere is the one that does all the heavy lifting and is intelligent and perceptive, and that the right hemisphere is a bit of a kind of no good. We're not really kind of sure what it is. I mean, it might be there for propping up the left hemisphere to make sure it doesn't fall over. I mean, literally, people have talked like that, but I see them as having developed two entirely different roles. They've been separate in all the brains we know, going right the way down to reptiles and even the networks of insects, of nematode worms, and even the most ancient sea creature that we know of already shows an asymmetrical neural network, which is very interesting in itself. But what I think has happened in humans is with the evolution of language, we've decided to devote one part of the brain for dealing entirely in theory of the symbols of experience rather than the gathering of experience itself. And in a new book I'm writing, I actually take the pains to go through all the various ways in which we get a hang on the world. And in all cases, the left hemisphere is not as good at this as the right hemisphere. Why is that? Because the left hemisphere needs to be kept away from that because it's busy doing some theoretical processing. Now, the thing is that in fact, the right hemisphere is actually more intelligent. And I mean in terms of IQ. In the book that I've been writing, I've got the information about that, which sounds a bit odd, but it's also the one that attends much more broadly to the world, perceives more, makes better judgments, is less taken in. Tends not to jump to conclusions in the way the left hemisphere does. Has social and emotional understanding in the way the left hemisphere doesn't. And indeed, it is the one that we rely on to be connected to and make sense of the world. When people have a left hemisphere stroke, they carry on, for all intents and purposes, being largely in touch with the same world they were in before. But when they have a right hemisphere stroke, they find it hard to understand what's happening, what people mean when they say things. I mean, their language functions are going, but what does this really mean anymore? So patients who are cared for by people and they have a right hemisphere of stroke, the main complaint is that these patients lack any human understanding or empathy, whereas the complaint with people who have a left hemisphere stroke is they have difficulty reading and writing. He's really on a very different level. So to come back to the master and his hemisphere, the right hemisphere is in the way the master the idea I had here was of a spiritual community in which there was a wise spiritual master who looked after the business of a community so that it flourished and grew. And in a while it became obvious that the master couldn't look after all the daily business of the community and indeed ought not to get involved with it, in fact, if he was to be able to maintain his all important overview. And so he delegated his brightest and best sort of second in command to go about doing the sort of administrative business. But this administrator, while very bright, wasn't bright enough to know what it was he didn't know. And so he thought, what does a master know? What does he know? He's just sitting back at the palace meditating saraphically, I'm the one that does all the hard work here and I'm the one that knows. And so he took on the mantle of the master and in the process, because he didn't know what the master knew, he was not able to perform his job. And the whole community, the master and the emissary, fell to ruin. Now I see that as a parable very loosely based on a hint in nature to describe the relationship, the advancing relationship between the right and left hemisphere and the way we have ended up in the world today enthralled to the emissary to the servant that doesn't really understand what the master would have known and been able to tell us about. We could move on from there to just a little reflection on this question that you raised the divided nature of the brain. Yes, when I was in medical school, I mean, obviously we we saw that it was there it is on the slab and it's divided and it was just taken for granted and nobody really said why. What on earth is the point of having a mass of neuronal interconnections whose value we seem to believe is predicated on the sheer number of interconnections it can make? Why divide it right down the middle in this way? And as I say, this has been the case in all living creatures that we know of. Indeed, the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres, a band of fibers at the base of the brain that connects about 2% of the fibers of the brain directly is a mammalian invention. Up until mammals, ie. In birds and reptiles, amphibians monitorings, there isn't a corpus scalosum at all. So that's fascinating. And indeed, Chap called Hullings'jackson, who's one of the great fathers of modern neurology in the 19th century, said it's not common enough for us to wonder at this fact that the brain is divided in this way. And when I got to my medical training and so on, the topic of difference between the hemispheres was really a non subject. It was considered entirely pop psychology. It was tacky people pled with me don't allow your career to be tainted. You can do well, don't do this, don't get involved in this issue. It's all been rubbished a long time ago. But that's actually to go far too far. First of all, it's very clear and undeniable that the two hemispheres do have quite different functions because or at least they contribute to I'd rather put it this way they contribute to a human being in different ways. You can see that when people have strokes in one hemisphere, they have a stroke in the exactly same sort of mirror position in the other hemisphere. The outcome is completely different. So it's not good enough to say they're just the same, they aren't. And they wouldn't have evolved in this way if there was really no purpose in their difference. The question simply was what was that difference? And all the things that people used to say back in the after the first split brain operations, which was a procedure invented to aid patients who had constant epileptic seizures. And somebody had the idea that it would be a good idea to divide the connection between the two hemispheres so that if a seizure started in one hemisphere, it wouldn't automatically overwhelm the whole brain. The other half would be able to carry on functioning. And indeed, it was a great success in achieving that. But it gave people a window into the difference between these two worlds because you could actually, by clever experimentation, address problems and questions and test out each hemisphere on its own. And this gave rise to a literature which was, in a way people jumped to a lot of conclusions rather fast. And the story was, well, the right brain is kind of emotional, but the left brain is rational and it's dependable. It may be a little bit boring, but at least it's very dependable. It tends to be our contact with reality. Whereas the right hemisphere is all very well if you want to paint pictures, but you know, and this is just so, so terrible as a way of looking at them. In many ways it's the inverse of the truth because as I have discovered and explained at length in my works, the left hemisphere is actually less in touch with reality, less reliable, more prone to jump to conclusions, more prone to quick and dirty decisions, and more prone to getting emotional in certain ways. For example, emotions are not all particularly in the right or left hemisphere, but one in particular is especially well represented in the left hemisphere and that's anger. So it is a fascinating topic. Well, so I want to revisit some of those landmarks that you just sketched because again, this is a topic that it seems to me most of culture and even most of scientific culture and even neuroscientific culture has really only glanced at and it's kept at a distance, I think largely because it is so strange. There's something very disconcerting about what we have come to know about the organization of the brain here and some of its implications. I'm wondering what you think about why this topic has been strikes me as it's almost been treated as a kind of intellectual pornography. Right. It's been held in disrepute, as you describe. But beyond the fact that there's been some cartoonish portrayals of the differences between left and right and this kind of pop psychological misinformation that has been spread, is there any other reason why you think this, why you were warned off this as a topic when you were doing your studies? I think there are two main reasons. One is that, as you say, it had got into popular culture in a certain way. So it was an ad, the Volvo, a car for your right brain and this kind of thing. And so people went, oh, please don't let's go near that. So in order to remain aloof neuroscience oh, no, it's not like that. Which indeed it isn't. But the other reason is that there were some, as I say, some slightly too quick conclusions drawn in the early days in the into the these were based on, I believe, a misconception which is that the real difference between the two hemispheres was what they do. Which is the right answer or the right way right question, perhaps to ask of a machine, what does it do? But it's not necessarily the right question to ask of a person, of a person who may be more interested in the how, in what way, in what manner this is done. And what I discovered fairly early on was that the old division, that reason and language was solely the province of the left hemisphere and emotion and visiospatial things, the province of the right hemisphere, that this was not the case. Each was involved in all of those, indeed, in everything that we do. Yeah. So where does that leave my position? Fine. Ready to go on a very interesting adventure. Because then one says it's not the what, it's the how. And in every case, whatever it is that each hemisphere is dealing with, it deals with it in a reliably, consistently, predictably different way. And what is that? Well, it's to do, I believe, with a problem which is entirely explicable in terms of Darwinian evolutionary advantage. So before we jump into that, I want to talk about the evolutionary origins of this, insofar as we can speculate about them. And just why would it be that brains would be divided and divided in the way that they are? But let's describe how we know that the hemispheres are so different in our own case, based on the I just want to summarize the split brain research in a little more detail for people who may not be familiar with it. And the interesting thing here is that the claims that you are going to make about the differences between right and left and you have gone so far as to suggest that the right hemisphere is the more competent, the more fully human, the more just the master, rather than the emissary. That is quite different from where science started once we started splitting the hemispheres by cutting the corpus colossal in those surgeries you described. And even people who were very close to that research early on felt that they went from thinking that the right hemisphere was, in fact, unconscious, right. That there was nothing that it was like to be the right hemisphere. That the left hemisphere was entirely the basis for human experience of any kind to thinking that the right hemisphere, while it might be conscious, is definitely subhuman. Michael Gazaniga, who I know, and who's very early as a cognitive neuroscientist studying this, worked under Roger Sperry. He at one point I'm sure he's recanted here, but at one point he suggested that the right hemisphere was essentially beneath a chimpanzee in its cognitive abilities. So we have come a long way in in appreciating what the right hemisphere is doing. Ironically, maybe it's our maybe it's our left hemisphere that had to be dragged all this way to appreciate what the right hemisphere is doing. So let's just describe the original fairy experiments born of the neurosurgeries done by Joe Bogan and discuss how does we were able to interrogate the hemispheres separately and know that there really are, in the case of a divided brain, two different points of view on the world and really two different subjects, two different people in a single human head. Absolutely. And it might be worth just saying that already in the 19th century people saw that the hemispheres were quite different, famously broken. DAX saw that patients who lost their speech had damage to a certain area only in the left frontal lobe, not in the right and so forth. And people observing, people with strokes, massive strokes in one hemisphere or the other over the subsequent decades often notice that the subjects seem to live in a quite different kind of a world. So it wasn't just the split brains that told us this. We should also recall that and this is a point you make in your book, that long before, a full century before anyone thought of doing the split brain work, we already knew, or someone already knew, that the right hemisphere was sufficient for consciousness. Because there were neuroanatomists who discovered upon autopsy that people who lived fully normal lives, which is to say conscious lives had, upon inspection after death, only one hemisphere of their brains could be the right or it could be the left. And this is born of the fact that there are people who are born without one hemisphere or they suffer some illness or injury very close to birth and manage developmentally to compensate. And this is just not discovered until much later in life. Now, this kind of thing can be discovered during routine neuroimaging. You can discover that a fully intact person is in fact missing a hemisphere and have been their entire lives. So we already knew that the right hemisphere could be conscious and then we seem to have forgotten that over the course of 100 years of doing neurology and neuroscience. Yes, I mean, what you're particularly, I think, alluding to there is the work of Wigan in the 19th century with this amazing figure who spent a lot of time in the autopsy room. But I would just like to gloss something since you've raised that topic. It's slightly different because if somebody's had only one hemisphere from birth which can sometimes happen because there may be a space occupying sac or lesion that's in the place where the hemisphere should be you're dealing with something rather different because from the word go, the neural the central nervous system will have reorganized itself to take into account this element. But still, it is true that people who develop normally can certainly live well with the right hemisphere. They're better off with their right hemisphere if they've only got to have one than with the left. Anyway, to come back to the split brain operation yes, first of all, people were amazed by a couple of things that they just observed without doing any experiments. People were first of all thinking what would it be like for somebody to have the two parts of their brain completely separate? When I say completely separate, there are a couple of minor fish, minor commissions that connect the hemispheres. But to all intents and purposes, the very much, the most important had been severed. And the answer to that was that they were remarkably normal, as if these two hemispheres would carry on like that without doing a lot of talking to one another. But they did also notice, at least in the early days after the operation going on for the first months, that sometimes people would show completely conflicting behavior. So a woman would go to the wardrobe to take out a dress with her right hand and her left hand would take it and put it back and take out a different one. Or somebody would get out money to pay from the wallet and the other hand would take it away and put it back in his pocket. So this is the kind of thing that you saw, I believe there was a case of a man trying to embrace his wife with one hand and strangle her with the other. Yes. Well, at least push her away with you. I think the story's got more as it got told. It got better. But no, that's right. But very good. Very interesting experiments were devised, very clever and genius experiments were devised whereby, for example, you could give information to just one ear or you could give conflicting information to the two airs at the same time. And normally, of course, information is shared, but in this case it wouldn't be shared. And so you could actually have a different input to each hemisphere. And you can also do this visually using a technique called takistoscopy, in which a different image is put up in the right visual field, which goes to the left hemisphere from the one that's put up in the left visual field, which goes to the right hemisphere. And you can then ask questions of the person about what they've seen or what they've done. Some of those are rather intricate and would take us a long time to explain, particularly without a diagram. But one of the most interesting findings was that when the left hemisphere knew really nothing at all, because the information had all gone to the right hemisphere, it would pretend that it knew all about what was going on. So when it was asked, why did you respond in a certain way about which it knew didle squat? Because that had been the information the right hemisphere had had and that was why we had responded in that way. It would make something up that was plausible. And it is one way of looking at it is that the left hemisphere is extraordinarily good at making things up and it's a bullshitter, in fact. And this is why Mike Gazaniga calls it the interpreter, because it can make sense of whatever it sees happening and it actually seems to believe its own propaganda. The left hemisphere seems to have dominated our politics of late. One thing you can see is the confabulatory nature of the left hemisphere in the news on an hourly basis. You can indeed. And on that Roger Sperry, who, as you mentioned, was one of the most important neuroscientists of that era, investigating this phenomenon, for which he was given a Nobel Prize, said and he was no mean philosopher, actually, as well as being a neuroscientist, he said that the problem with modern Western civilization is that it has relegated, it ignores the right hemisphere. Anyway, Mike Gazaniga has changed his views quite a lot since those early pronouncements. I imagine they live on to haunt him slightly. But what pleases me is that some of the things I was saying earlier about the way in which the left hemisphere is more prone to bias and more prone to jump to conclusions and make poor judgments, actually comes from the work of Nikki Marinsek, who works in Gazanica's lab. So obviously things have changed now, but it's been a process of trying to get people to see that just because all we knew was a rather quick and dirty formula at a certain stage, it wasn't enough to dismiss hugely important questions. Why is the brain divided? Why is it asymmetrical, by the way, since the skull that contains it is not? Why is the connection between the hemispheres so much involved with inhibition rather than facilitation? These were questions that haunted me and it took me 30 years, basically to come up with what I was able to write in The Master and His Emissary, and another ten years for what I've just written and I'm hoping will be published in the next twelve months. So, yes, it didn't start from a very auspicious place, but I was completely convinced that something of great interest was being neglected. And you asked why had people not sort of gone further with it? I think the answer is that to make sense of it would have required 30 years. And in doing so they would have basically forfeited their career, because when they were juniors, their bosses wouldn't have wanted them to do research on lateralization. They said, don't forget it, that's all passe. And as they got further on, they wouldn't have got grants and they wouldn't have got promotion and so on. So actually very few people have taken the trouble to really look at this in any great depth. And with all due modesty, I am one of the people who has spent decades really, really getting acquainted with the literature. And so I know some things about it that there are people who do know them, but it's not in the general culture. I think there may be an additional reason. Here, which is that there's something impossible or at least very difficult to assimilate about this finding into one's sense of one's own being in the world. I want to try to make what we're talking about here as subjectively real to people as we can make it. And we'll go further into just the differences between the hemispheres and perhaps what we can start with just the basic question which you've raised is why is the brain divided in the first place? And why would it not be functionally symmetrical? But here's what strikes me as most strange about the phenomenon which you really can just extrapolate from the split brain finding. So the split brain finding is that if you divide the brain surgically by cutting the comissures or at least the corpus colossal, but the anterior comicure and there are a few others that need not be cut but could be cut and you have this very stark finding where you have just undeniably two points of view. Whatever their differences, as we will yet describe, there are two points of view at that point in the the human mind is is dual and the left hand quite literally doesn't know what the right hand is doing. And reminding people again about the contralateral organization of the nervous system, as you said, the right hemisphere in a divided brain sees only the left side of the world and the left hemisphere sees the right side of the world. It's not divided left and right eye, it's the left hemifield within both eyes and the right hemisphere within both eyes. So you can present an image to the right hemisphere which the left hemisphere does not see. But because language is so disproportionately subserved by the left hemisphere, certainly 95% of people, when you're talking to the subject and you say what did you see? The answer you're getting though the right hemisphere hears you, the answer you're getting is coming from the left hemisphere that has control of speech. And so you're talking to a person who says well, I didn't see anything. And then in an experiment like this, you could say well, can you take your left hand and reach for the object that you may or may not have seen? And then at that point, the right hemisphere, which is in full control of the left hand or near full control of the left hand, can reach and pick up an object which is in fact the object that was presented to it visually. And then when asked why did you pick up this key or egg or whatever the object was? As you point out, the left hemisphere at that point confabulates and tells a story. It seems to always have a story as to why in this case, the left hand over which it has no control did what it did. And it shows that it has basically no reality testing mechanism left to it, left to its own devices. It will just publicize some account of the world and it's apparently the most credulous person on earth. The amazing thing about this is if you extrapolate from this finding that a divided brain gives you two people, right, two fairly different people, and even if they were the same in their emotional tone and their cognitive styles, which they're not, there would still be two of them at this .2 different points of view on the world. If you extrapolate from that and realize that, you know, as you said, an intact corpus colossal only terminates on a mere 2% of cortical neurons, right? I mean, it's not that every neuron is connected with every other like neuron across the hemispheres, right? So we have to be imperfectly connected even in the healthiest, most intact brain. Which is to say there isn't perfect information sharing across the hemispheres. And so it opens the question to what degree are we dual even now? To what degree could there be islands of consciousness in an intact brain or shifting, overlapping, non shared spaces of consciousness? Whereas it is something that it's like to be part of the right hemisphere and there's something that it's like to be part of the left hemisphere. And in any given moment, these points of view may not be unified. They may be I'm agnostic as to whether or not this is a totally fluid situation and they can come to be unified and separate again. But it gives a kind of Freudian spooky picture of the mind that the unconscious from the point of view of the conscious, you in this moment may in fact be conscious and looking over your shoulder. In a sense, the phenomenology with which any person is identified subjectively may not be the totality of the subjectivity, the conscious subjectivity in their own brain. And I think there's something about that picture that is so weird that people just don't want to think about it. Yes, you pointed to something definitely that I don't think can be dismissed. But I think I'd like to sort of moderate that picture a little. Sure. And the first is that we all grow up with information coming to us from both parts of the world and it is communicated through the body and into the brain using both endocrine transmitters as well as the neurological system that we are describing, right? And the normal person is receiving a picture all around of the world and this information is being taken as a whole. So on the whole, we don't find ourselves noticing this. In fact, if we noticed it, it would be very damaging for us because we would find ourselves constantly torn like the person who's trying to pay and putting the money back in the pocket. And it's also worth saying that after usually about the first five or six months, most split brain subjects started to lose this inter manual conflict as it's called. So it's something that the person sort of accommodated to. But it's also not just true. On the other hand, it's also not just split brain patients that must be thinking very differently and seeing the world very differently. Because you can produce this effect experimentally in normal subjects using transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a technique whereby you can painlessly stimulate or suppress, depending on the frequency of the pulses areas of the brain. And I don't know, but you've probably talked about that in another podcast. But in any case, the point is this when you do that, something full fledged and ready to go is released. So it's not like it was there. When you knock out the left hemisphere and knock out the right hemisphere, you find instantaneously decisions being made which are characteristic of what we know to be the way of the right or the left hemisphere. And this can actually be advantageous in certain circumstances. So that problem solving of a certain kind Alan Snyder in Sydney has experimented on this can be facilitated by suppressing the left frontal cortex and enhancing the right frontal cortex so that complex problems, including mathematical problems, can be more easily solved. In any case, all I'm really saying there is that, yes, there is something spooky and it's not just in split brain patients. I acknowledge that because as I say, it's there and ready to go. And when people have a stroke and they suddenly start experiencing the world differently, how did that happen? Just like that, unless it was there and ready to go in the intact individual. So we know that is the case. But I suppose I'm less troubled by the idea that there might be two people here. It looks like that, but then it would only be like that if, as it were, we were sure that whatever it is that is my left hemisphere's consciousness and my right hemisphere's consciousness were generated straight out of those hemispheres. Now, I suspect that this may be a point on which we might differ, but I'm not convinced that the brain is merely a producer or secretary of consciousness. So it becomes possible to think of consciousness that is a flow and that is transmitted transduced by the brain. So you can see the brain as something that is receiving a stream of information to both hemispheres simultaneously and together and that that is producing the whole personal experience. But that what happens when you artificially divide the brain, is that it's rather like an island in a stream where the stream has to go either side of the island and then reconvene again. And the stories I've been telling about the coming together and the coming separately of the two hemispheres might be better thought of in terms of such a metaphor. That's all, really, I'm suggesting I think it's too extreme to say that there are two persons that says there's Sam Harris left and Sam Harris right. I think that's too simple. Yeah. No, I wasn't suggesting that. I guess what I was suggesting, though, is that in any picture other than perfect information sharing, then you have to ask yourself what is left out and what are the consequences of it's being left out for subjectivity in. Any given moment and however fluid you want to make it. Anything less than perfect access across the commissures gives you this Venn diagram where of of conscious experience wherein the two circles don't completely overlap and become one. So then you have to ask yourself well, what is the penumbra like where the left doesn't share what the right is in fact experiencing and vice versa. And again this could be completely fluid so that you could have more global states of the hemispheres where there is a kind of synchrony. And synchrony may in fact be what is mediating the sharing of a conscious percept or thought in any given moment. But again, the spooky part for me is not so much that much of what the brain is doing is unconscious or outside the experience of the conscious subject at any moment. It's the idea that some of what's outside your experience as a conscious subject in this moment may itself be conscious. Right? That's the thing that just makes the hair stand up on the back of one's neck. Go ahead. So much that you're commenting on there that's so important. I mean, something we might come to later, because it comes back to the question why the two hemispheres are separate in the way that they are. Is that much of the traffic, as you describe it, bringing information together? Across the corpus callosum is inhibitory. And much of the effect of the corpus callosum is for one hemisphere to say, I'm dealing with this, you keep out of it, because that's just going to make the matter confused and I'll work slower. So even in a perfectly functioning brain where as it were, at one level the communication is good, some of the functional effect of the communication is not positive but negative. It's not facilitation, it's inhibition. But even more so, I wanted to comment on the question about consciousness, because, of course, consciousness means many different things. And in one sense, we think that consciousness is what is in my mind, that I'm aware of right now and I'm focusing on. But that is variously estimated to be between half a percent and 5% of what's going on in one's brain. In fact, I read a paper in which the the authors said that 99.44% of brain activity was not within the field of consciousness which is alarmingly precise but in any way it makes the point. But the way I would see that is that there is also material that can quite quickly become conscious. It's just that it's not conscious now for reasons of expediency. If we are to function, we simply can't be conscious of many things of which we have consciousness at a different level and that can be brought into effect like that if it's necessary. So the way I see it is that one distinction between the left and the right hemisphere, which we must come on to at some point, is that the left hemisphere has very narrow beam attention that is highly clarified and precise, but it's only to like three degrees of the 360 degree attentional arc, whereas the right hemisphere sees a very broad picture. And that is quite different. It's on the lookout, it's vigilant all the time. So if you think of the field of consciousness as being a stage on which life is going on, the bit that is within the spotlight is the bit the left hemisphere sees and that's the bit we say, oh, I'm conscious of that. But when the spotlight moves 5 minutes later, you're no longer conscious of what you were conscious of even a few seconds ago, but it's still within your consciousness, it's still possible for you to summon it and it's still there. It's like the part of the stage that's not illuminated hasn't gone away. It's just a bit we're not any longer attending to in this very particular highly selfconscious consciousness. What would you say about that? That's interesting. I think I would bound the concept of consciousness a little differently there because for me, again, I think consciousness as a concept is actually irreducible, which is to say we define it in circular terms. It's synonymous with experience. Agreed. Yeah. You know, I like Thomas Nagel's framing that it's something that it's like to be a system. So if a bat is conscious, that's simply saying that there's something that it's like to be a bat. If you could trade places with a bat, you'd have some qualitative character to your being in the world. It wouldn't be synonymous with just having the lights go out. No. So when talking about one's own conscious experience, I would differentiate consciousness from attention, say, so I can be paying attention to one thing, but also dimly aware of the things that I'm trying to exclude from my experience by focusing on the one thing. There's a kind of a center and periphery very much analogous to what we experience in vision. You have your fovial in focus vision and then you have all the stuff you can see in the corner of your eye and so there's a spotlight of attention, but then there's this wider field of illuminated experience that has a qualitative character. And at the margins of this, it's always possible to have, as you say, new percepts and ideas and phenomenons surface and be brought into direct awareness. And as William James quite brilliantly pointed out now over 100 years ago, our experience of this, the kind of liminal boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness, has a kind of structure that can be interrogated if you're clever. And we've learned to do that scientifically in all kinds of ways. But even just introspectively, you can notice things that one example that James gave is that if you think about what it's like to suffer the tip of the tongue phenomenon, you're trying to remember a word, you're trying to remember somebody's name and you just can't get anything there. So on the one hand we're talking about what is absent from consciousness. Like the word is not there, the name is not there. There is a vacancy which you're struggling to fill. But this vacancy has structure because someone can say to you is the name Jim? And you instantly know that it's not Jim. You can exclude Jim because Jim is not the name you're trying to think of and yet you don't know what the name is that you're trying to think of. There are fascinating aspects to this where take a phenomenon like hemi neglect, which, you know, we're we're in our leisurely way. Getting to is one of these issues where you have, in this case, a right hemisphere lesion, usually in the parietal lobe, which causes this phenomenon of people neglecting the left half of the world and being unaware of their deficit. Right. So if you tell them to draw a clock face, they'll draw a circle, but then they'll put all the numbers on the on the right side of the clock. If you ask them to start writing on a piece of paper, they'll start writing down the just the right half of the piece of paper. But this raises a kind of Jamesian conundrum which is in order to systematically neglect the left half of the world, you need to know where the middle is, right? And to know where the middle is, you do need to know where the left half of the world is. I mean, in order to reliably start writing on the right half of a piece of paper, part of you needs to have found the middle in order to jump over to the right side of things. So the question is again, the very strange question from my point of view is not that some or most of this processing is happening subliminally in the dark beneath the light of consciousness. It's that some of it could be associated with consciousness, that there could be something that it's like to see the left half of the world and then get the rest of the person to ignore it. There's something that it's like to know the word that the rest of you is trying to think of and yet not provide it or not be able to provide it. And this just opens the door. And I'm not suggesting that in an intact brain we have two separate people in there, but insofar as the real estate of consciousness itself might not be fully integrated, it does force a very spooky picture. And again, a quasi Freudian picture of a conscious part of you that you, the so called conscious subject, isn't aware of in any given moment. Right. There's something that it's like to be part of your mind that you the conscious person in this moment, doesn't directly experience. And that's, again, even if you're convinced that that is a possibility, and even if you see some indication of that in your life in moments of self deception or in or in moments of, you know, dream you might experience a dream where there really seems like there's an author of the dream that has anticipated you as the protagonist of the dream, not knowing what's going on, having a dream where a dream character is telling you a joke that has a punchline, that surprises you, that's just an incredible experience. You're the protagonist in your dream. You meet a person who doesn't exist, and you're obviously not aware of that because it's a dream. It's not a lucid dream, and this person tells you a joke and you're waiting to hear the punchline. And then when the punch line is delivered, it's actually funny. And so how is it possible for part of your mind to have written on demand something that the other part of your mind will find funny? All of these moments, again, suggest something very weird, and I think it's just very hard for people to keep this in focus. You raised so many things, a few issues. If you could be patient. Sure. I think the first thing I think is if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I am speaking with Renee Duressa. Renee is the Director of Research at New Knowledge and the head of Policy at the nonprofit Data for Democracy, and she investigates the spread of hyperpartisan and destructive narratives across social networks. She's co authored a recent report on the the Russian disinformation campaign both before and since the 2016 presidential election, and we talk about all that she's advised politicians and policymakers, members of Congress, the State Department. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and many other outlets. She's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Truman National Security Project. Security fellow? She also holds degrees in Computer Science and political science from SUNY Stonybrook. As you'll hear, Renee was recommended to me by my friend and former podcast guest Tristan Harris, who recommended her as an authority on just what happened with the Russian influence campaign in recent years. And Renee did not disappoint. So without further ado, I bring you Renee Duressta. I am here with Renee Duressa. Renee, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. I was introduced to you through our mutual friend, Tristan Harris. How do you know Tristan? Tristan and I met in mid 2017. I had written an essay about Bots, and he read it and he shared it to Facebook, funny enough, and we discovered that we had about 60 mutual friends, even though we'd never met. And we met for breakfast a couple of days later. And he wanted to talk about what I was seeing and the things I was writing about and how they intersected with his vision of social platforms as having profound impacts on individuals. My research into how social platforms are having profound impacts on policy and society. And we had breakfast, hit it off, and I think had breakfast again a couple of days later. So fast friends. Yeah. Well, tristan is great. So many people will recall he's been on the podcast, and I think he's actually been described as the conscience of Silicon Valley, just in terms of how he has been sounding the alarm on the toxic business model of social media in particular. So you touched on it there for a second, but give us a snapshot of your background and how you come to be thinking about the problem of bots and also just the specific problem we're going to be talking about of the Russian disinformation campaign and hacking of democracy. Yes. It's sort of a convoluted way that I got to investigating Russia and disinformation. It actually started back in 2014. I became a mom, and I just moved to San Francisco a little bit prior, and I had to get my kid onto a preschool waiting list, which is not always easy. Yeah, not like a nice preschool. Just like a preschool. I knew California had some antivax problems, and I started googling for the data sets. The California department of Public Health has public data sets where they tell you vaccination rates in schools. Anyway, I looked and I thought, god, this is a disaster waiting to happen. And lo and behold, a couple of months later, the Disneyland measles outbreak in fact did happen. And I reached out to my congressman, it was the first time I'd ever done that. And I said, hey, we should have a law for this now. We should eliminate the vaccine opt outs. And they told me they were introducing something. So I said, great, I'd love to help have a data science background. I can maybe be useful as an analyst. And what wound up happening was that there was this extraordinary thing as the bill took shape, which was that the legislators were finding that polling in their districts was about 85% positive. Like, people really liked the idea of eliminating what were called personal belief exemptions, the right to just kind of voluntarily opt your kids out. But the social media conversation was like 99% negative. It was very hard to even find a single positive tweet or positive Facebook post expressing support for this bill. And so I started looking into why that was and discovered this entire kind of ecosystem of what was this hybrid between almost activism and manipulation. So there were very real activists who had very real points of view, and then they were doing things like using automation. So the reason that they were dominating the Twitter ecosystem was that they were actually turning on automated accounts. So they were just kind of spamming the hashtags that anytime you searched for anything related to the bill in the hashtag, you would find their content. So this is sort of like a guerrilla marketing tactic. And I thought how interesting that they were using it and then realized that there were like fake personas in there. There were people pretending to be from California who weren't from California. How were you figuring that out? How were you assessing a fake persona? They were created within days of the bill being introduced, and they existed solely to talk about this bill. And then I discovered these communities on Facebook, things with names like Tweet for Vaccine Freedom, where there were actually moderators in the group who were posting instructions on for people from out of state how they could get involved and the answer was, create a persona, change your location ID to somewhere in California, and then start tweeting. So they sort of at the time, it seemed brazen. Now it seemed so quaint. But these tactics to shape consensus, to really create the illusion that there was a mass consensus in opposition to this bill. And so a very small group of people using social media as an amplifier were able to achieve dominance to just really own the conversation. And it led me to think this is fascinating because what we have here is this form of activism where there is kind of like a real core, and then there's some manipulative tactics layered on top of the real core. But if you're not looking for the manipulation, you don't see it. And most people aren't going looking. They're not digging into this stuff. So it was kind of a first indication that our policy conversations, our social conversations, were not necessarily reflective of kind of the reality on the ground, the stuff that we were still seeing in the polls. It was an interesting experience. And then a couple of months after that law was all done, I got a call from some folks in the Obama administration in the digital service saying, hey, we've read your research. Because I published about this in Wired. Hey, we've read your research. We'd like you to come down and look at some of the stuff that's going on with ISIS. And I said, I don't know anything about ISIS or about terrorism. Candidly when they said, no, you have to understand the tactics are identical. The same kind of owning the narrative, owning the hashtags, reaching out to people, pulling them into secret Facebook groups, the idea that terrorists were actually following some of these kind of radicalization pathways, these efforts to kind of dominate the conversation. Anytime there was a real world event related to ISIS, they would get things trending on Twitter. And so people in the administration wanted to understand how this was happening and what they could do about it. So that was how I wound up getting more involved in this in sort of a more official capacity. It was first kind of conspiracy theorists and terrorists and then Russia. Russia was following the 2016 election. There was a sense that, again, there had been these bizarre bot operations, and they were far more nefarious and sophisticated than anyone had realized. And we had to do a formal investigation before we get into the Russia case. Specifically, how do you view the role of social media in this? Do you distinguish between the culpability or the negligence of Twitter versus Facebook versus YouTube? Are there bright lines between how they have misplayed this, or are they very similar in the role they're playing? I think that they've really evolved a lot since 2015. In the early conversations about ISIS, there was just to kind of take you back to 2015, the attitude wasn't, oh, God, we've got terrorists on our platform. Let's get ahead of this, right? It was Facebook, to its credit, took that attitude from day one. This is a violation of our terms of service. We take down their content, we find them, we shut them down. YouTube would kind of take down the beheading videos as they popped up. Twitter, if you go back and you read articles from 2015, I've been doing a lot of going back and looking at the conversations from that time. You see a lot of sympathy for Twitter and this idea that if you take down ISIS, what comes next? There's a slippery slope, interesting co on to ponder Satan. If we take down ISIS, I mean, who knows what we have to take down next? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And I would be sitting there in these rooms hearing these conversations saying, like, these are beheading videos, you guys. These are terrorist recruiters. These are people who are killing people. What the hell is this conversation? I can't get my head around it, but that's where we were in 2015. And go back and read things that people like the entities like the EFF were putting out, and you'll see that this was a topic of deep concern. What would happen if we were to silence ISIS? Would we inadvertently silence things that were tangentially related to ISIS, and then from there, would we silence certain types of expression of Islam? And so on and so forth? It was a very different kind of mindset back then. I think that the context has changed so much over the last year, in part because of stuff like what Tristan is doing and the tech hearings. And I think that 2016 was almost like the sort of Pearl Harbor that made people realize that, holy shit, this actually does have an impact. And maybe we do have to do something to get ahead of this because everybody's doing it now. Reading recent articles specifically about Facebook makes me think that there is just an insuperable problem here. You can't put enough people on it to appropriately vet the content, and the algorithms don't seem to be up to it. And so the mistakes that people plus algorithms are making are so flagrant. I mean, they're preserving the accounts of known terrorist organizations. They're deleting the accounts of Muslim reformers or ex Muslims who simply say something critical about the faith. I mean, there's just people can't figure out which end is up, apparently. And once you view these platforms as publishing platforms that are responsible for their content, it's understandable that you would want to, given the kinds of things we're going to talk about. But I don't know how they solve this. There's a lot of tristan and others have done a lot of work on changing the conversation around culpability and accountability. And I think that, again, in 2015, 2016, there would be references to things like the CDA 230 the Communication Decency Act, Section 230 that gives them the right to moderate, which they chose to use as the right to not moderate. And the norms, I would say that that evolved in the industry around, not wanting to be seen as being sensors in any way at the time, which meant that they left a whole lot of stuff up and didn't really do very much digging. And then now the shift kind of the pendulum swinging hard in the other direction, which is leading to allegations that conservatives are being censored and allegations that per your point unsophisticated moderation. I think there was an article about this in The New York Times over the weekend. Has led to some disasters where they take down people fighting extremists in Myanmar and link the extremists up. I think that the recognition that they are culpable, that fundamental change in the attitudes of the public has led them to start to try to take more responsibility. And right now it's being done in something of kind of a handhanded way. Yeah, well, they're certainly culpable for the business model that have kind of less of a view of Twitter here because Twitter doesn't seem to have its business model together in the way that Facebook does. But clearly Facebook per Tristan's point that their business model promotes outrage and sensationalism, preferentially. And the fact that they continue to do that is just selecting for these crazy, conspiratorial, divisive voices and then they're trying to kind of curate against those, but they're still amplifying those because it's their business model. And at least that's the way it seems as of my recent reading of the New York Times. Is that still your understanding of the bad geometry over there? Yeah, I would say that's accurate. So I see a lot of I try to focus on the the disinformation piece. There are some people who work on privacy, some who think about monopoly, you know, a lot of different grievances with tech platforms these days. But I see a lot of the manipulation specifically I would say, comes from a combination of three things. There's this mass consolidation of audiences on a handful of very few platforms, and that's just because as the web moved from these kind of decentralization, where there's always been manipulation and disinformation and lies on the Internet. Right, but the mass consolidation of audiences onto a very small handful of platforms meant that if you were going to run a manipulative campaign, much like if you were going to run a campaign for Pepsi, you only had to really blanket five different sites. And then the second piece was the precision targeting. Right. So the ads business model, the thing that you're referring to, these are attention brokers, which means they make money if you spend time on the platform. So they gather information about the user in order to show the user things that they want to see so that they stay on the platform. And then also as they're gathering that information, it does double duty and that they can use it to help advertisers target them. And then I would say the last piece of this is the algorithms that you're describing and the fact that for a very, very long time now, they've been very easy to game. And when we think about what you're describing, the idea that outrage gets clicks, that's true. And the algorithm, particularly things like the recommendation engines, they're not sophisticated enough to know what they're showing. So there is no sense of downstream harm or psychological harm or any other type of harm. All they know is this content gets clicks and this content drives engagement. And if I show this content to this person, they're going to stay on the platform longer. I can mine them for more data, I can show them more ads. So it's beneficial to them to do this. And I think one of the interesting challenges here is as we think about recommendation engines, that's where there is, in my opinion, a greater sense of culpability and a greater requirement for responsibility on the part of the platforms. And that's because they've moved into acting as a curator, right? They're saying you should see this. And the recommendation engines in particular often surface things that are not necessarily what we would necessarily want them to be showing. This is how you get at things like my antivaxers, right? I had an antivax account, an account that was active in antivax groups and it didn't engage with any of the people. It just sort of sat in the groups and kind of observed and it was being referred into Pizza Gate groups so long before pizza Gate was a matter of national conversation. Long before that guy showed up with a gun and shot up a pizza place thinking that Hillary Clinton was running a sex dungeon out of the basement. These personas that were prone to conspiratorial thinking the recommendation engine recognized that there was a correlation in people who were prone to conspiracy type A would be interested in Pizza Gate, which we can call conspiracy type B. And then soon enough, QAnon started to show up in the recommendation engine. And so the question becomes, where is the line? The platform is actively making a recommendation here. These accounts have never gone and proactively searched for Pizza Gate and QN on it. They're being suggested to them. So where is the responsibility? Should we have the recommendation engine not surface that type of content? Or is even making that suggestion a form of censorship? These are the kinds of conversations I think we'll start to see more of in 2019. Okay, well, let's focus on the topic at hand, which is Russian interference in, I guess, democracies everywhere, but specifically the US presidential election in 2016 and the recent report that you helped produce on this, which runs to 100 pages. And I'll put a link to that where I post this on my blog first. Just got a big picture, sort of political partisan question. It seems to me that many people, certainly most Trump supporters, continue to doubt whether Russia interfered in anything in 2016. And this is fake news. Is there any basis for doubt about that at this point? No, this is just crystal clear. As a matter of what our intelligence services tell us and as a matter of what people like you can ascertain by just studying online behavior. It happened. There's really nothing else to say about it. The intelligence agencies know it happened. The foreign governments know it happened. Researchers know it happened. The platforms acknowledge it happened. I mean, they're sure there can be some small group of people who continue to live like Ostriches, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen. And what do you do with the charge that we do the same thing all the time everywhere ourselves, so there's really nothing to complain about here? Well, we probably do it to each other at this point. There's evidence of that as far back as 2016. Some things that insinuations about Alabama. There's a whole lot of evidence that domestic groups can and do do this as well. And that's why what I keep going to when I talk about this topic publicly is that this is not a partisan issue. This is not one state, one foreign actor interfering in one moment issue. This is sort of just an ongoing global challenge at this point. If we're speaking specifically about Russia and whether that happened, I think that it's incontrovertible truth at this point. And the other thing that seems incontrovertible is that it happened to favor the election of Trump in many obvious ways and in many surprising ways that we'll go into. But it they were not playing both sides of this. This was not a pro Clinton campaign. And in your report, you break down three ways which their meddling influence things and or attempted to influence things. We're going to be talking about one of them. But I'll just run through those three quickly, and then we'll focus on one. The first is there were attempts to actually hack online voting systems, and you know, that that's been reported on elsewhere. Secondly, there were there was just this very well known and consequential cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee and the leaking of that material through WikiLeaks. And that was obviously to the great disadvantage of the Clinton campaign. Then finally, and this is what we're going to focus on, there was just the social influence based on the disinformation campaign of the sort that you've just described, using bots and fake personas and targeting various groups. This is what's surprising when you get into the details of who was targeted and the kinds of messages that were spread. It's fairly sophisticated and amazingly cynical. There's a kind of morbid fun you can imagine these people were having at our expense in how they played one community against another in American society. So let's focus on this third method. And this was coming from something called the Internet Research Agency. We'll call them the IRA, as you do in your report. What is the IRA and what were they doing to us? So the IRA is you could think of them a little bit as a social media marketing agency meets an intelligence agency. So what they did, to a large extent, was they kind of built these pages. They built these communities, they built these personas, and they pretended to be Americans, americans of all stripes. So some were Southern Confederates, some were Texas secessionists, some were black liberationists. They had all of these personas. They really ran the gamut. What they were doing was they were creating pages to appeal to tribalism. So a lot of the conversation about the IRA over the last two years has referred to this idea that they were exploiting divisions in society. And that's true. But the data set that I had access to, which was provided by the tech platforms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the first time that anybody saw the full scope through the full two and a half years. And what we saw there was not a media marketing, meme ship, poster type agency that was just throwing out memes half hazardly and trying to exploit divisions. What they were trying to do was grow tribes. So a little bit a little bit different. The IRA originally started as an entity that was designed to propagandize to Russian citizens, to Ukrainian citizens, to people who were in Russia's sphere of influence. And the early stuff in the data set, twitter provided, the earliest possible information of the material the companies gave us was actually Russian language tweets talking about the invasion of Crimea. It was talking about it was creating conspiracy theories about the downing of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17. So the early activities of the IRA were very much focused, inward focused domestically. And then around 2015, they turned their energy to the United States in what the Mueller and some of the Eastern District Court indictments have been referring to as Project Lochta. So Project Lochta was when the effort to grow these American tribes really started. This precedes the election. Right. So this precedes trump's plausible candidacy, and there was still this goal of amplifying tribalism in the US. Yeah. So the goal was to create these this is a long game. This was not a short term social media operation to screw around with an election. This was in a long game to develop extended relationships, trusted relationships with Americans. And what they did was they created these pages. So an example would be Heart of Texas was a page that really amplified notions of Texas pride. Almost all of their pages, an LGBT page, pages targeting the black community, pages targeting Confederate aficionados. All of these pages were designed around the idea of Pride and Pride in whatever particular tribe they were targeting. So the vast majority of the content, particularly in 2015, in the early days, was, we are LGBT and proud. We are Texas and Texans and proud. We are proud descendants of Confederates. And so this idea that you should have Pride in your tribe was what they reinforced over and over and over and over again. And then you would see them periodically slide in content that was either political or divisive. Sometimes that would be about othering another group. So we are some of the content targeting, the black community in particular did this. This country is not for us. We're not really part of America. We exist outside of America. And so a lot of exploitation of real grievances tied to real news events, so constant drumbeat of Pride, plus leveraging real harms to exploit feelings of alienation, sometimes you would see them do this with political content. So as the primaries heated up, that was where you started to see them weaving in their support for candidate Trump, weaving in their opposition to candidate Clinton. I'm looking at your report now, and I'm seeing this list of themes, and I'll just tick off some of these because it's, again, rather diabolical and clever how they were playing both sides of the board here. So they would focus on the black community and Black Lives Matter and issues of police brutality, but also they would amplify pro police Blue Lives Matter pages. You had antirefugee messages and, you know, immigration, border issues, Texas cultures, you said southern culture, Confederate history, various separatist movements, Muslim issues, LGBT issues, Meme culture, red Pill culture, gun rights in the Second Amendment, pro Trump and anti Clinton, and more anti Clinton in the form of pro Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein. Tea party stuff. Religious rights, native American issues. And all of this is just sowing divisiveness and conflict. Although it really does seem there was to a surprising degree of focus on the black community. Do you have more information or just an opinion about why that was such an emphasis for them? Yeah. So there were about there were 81 Facebook pages, 133 Instagram accounts. Of the 81 Facebook pages, 30 focused on the black community. Now, there were other pages that focused on other kind of traditionally left leaning groups, as you mentioned, muslims, Native Americans, Latinos. So there were other kind of non black lefty pages. Before we go on, Renee, those numbers don't sound very large. So 81 Facebook pages sounds like not even a drop in the ocean. I think we should give some sense of the scale of what happened here. Yes. So there were 81 Facebook pages. I think there were about 62,000 posts across them. There were 133 Instagram accounts, 116,000 posts across them. There were about 187,000,000 engagements on the Instagram content and another 75 million engagements on the Facebook content. And an engagement is like a like, or a share or a comment. The pages, to be totally clear, they had what I would call, like, a long tail. Like, 20 of them were successful enough that they had in the hundreds of thousands of followers, and then a lot of the remainder of the long tail was just crap. They were just failed pages. And so one of the things that was actually interesting was you could see them in the data set, pivoting those pages, so pivoting their failures, going in there and actually and saying, like, okay, well, one example is the army of jesus page. A lot of people have seen some of the memes of hillary fighting satan. There are about 900 posts by that account before it found jesus. It started as a kermit the frog meme page, memes of, like, kermit sipping tea and stuff, and they didn't seem to get enough traction there. They pivoted it to a simpsons meme page, and it was sharing these kind of ridiculous homer simpson memes again, just, like, messing around with american culture, seeing what stuck. When that didn't stick, all of a sudden it became a religious page devoted to jesus. They seem to have then kind of, like, nailed it. You start to see the memes doing things like like for jesus. When you do something like, say, like like for jesus, share for jesus, they're getting people to share their content organically. So you actually see them kind of hitting their stride with standard kind of tactics of social media audience growth with examples like this, this army of jesus account. So it's absolutely true that many of their pages were complete failures that had no lift. But then some of their pages were actually if you go and you look at the audience reach using things like crowd tangle, and you look at their engagements versus the engagements for other conservative pages or other black media, you do see them kind of popping up in the top 20, top 50 in terms of engagement overall. Am I saying these were, like, the best possible pages for this content for these audiences? No, but what they did do was they achieved substantial success with some of them, and they used their successful pages to direct people to their other pages. So the black community was particularly they did this particularly, I can't say effectively necessarily, because I can't see the conversion data. I know that they showed people these other memes. I don't know if people converted to the page for these other memes, but what they were doing was they were saying, if you like this content from our page, blackstagram that you're following, here's some other, hey, look at this other group called williams and calvin. And of course, there's no disclosure that the internet research agency is also running williams and calvin. And then they're saying, look at this other content from this page called blackvist. Look at this other content from this page called. Nefertiti's community. So a lot of this kind of cross pollination of audiences in an attempt to push people so that if they're following one of their accounts, one of their pages, they're inundated with posts from the others, right? And they're also amplifying legitimate pages that are highly polarized in their message. So what's cagey here is that not only creating their own fake partisan account if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes, 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today I'm speaking with Matt Tayibi. Matt is a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, and he was a winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. He has written many books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Great Derangement Gryphtopia and The Divide. And in this episode, we focus on the state of journalism and the vacuousness and polarization of our politics. We discuss the controversy over inviting Steve Bannon and then disinviting him to the New Yorker Festival. We talk about monetizing, the Trump phenomenon, the Jamal Khashoggi murder, the Kavanaugh hearing, the Rolling Stone reporting on the UVA rape case, the viability of the political center, the 2020 presidential election, the Russia investigation, our vanishing attention span, and many other topics. Anyway, many of you have requested that I get Matt on the podcast. Please enjoy my conversation with Matt Taibi. I am here with Matt Taibi. Matt, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So we haven't met, but I've been a fan of your work for quite some time and no doubt we have friends in common, so we haven't figured that out yet, but I'm sure we're in some similar orbit of some large and dangerous object now. Definitely. So how would you people will be fairly familiar with you, I think, but how do you describe your interests as a journalist? I would say I'm an investigative journalist. Usually I'm also do commentary, obviously. I kind of my specialty over the years has been the sort of deep dive into an arcane subject. Specifically after the financial services crash of 2008, I did a lot of stories about how Wall Street works and basically translating all of that for ordinary readers. And I'm a humorist kind of an absurdist. I take an absurdist point of view on things as often as I can. And yeah, I think people would probably classify me as on the left, but I don't really think of myself that way. I am sort of more of a writer than I am a polemicist, I guess. Yeah, I want to touch the financial crisis at some point, but let's just start with the current state of journalism and its health or state of disease. You have an interesting perspective on this because you actually grew up in a journalistic family. Wasn't your father was a TV reporter? He started in the business when he was 17. He was a student at Rutgers University, and when I was born, he started working very early and became a television reporter in his early 20s in Boston. And so my childhood was actually a lot like the movie Anchorman. I spent a lot of time around those goofy 70s affiliates, and my dad was sort of one of those characters. He had the bad facial hair, and he was in a big collar shirt, big collar shirts, funny ties, and he had mutton shops and all that cool stuff. But I grew up around the business. My earliest memories are all journalists. My father's, my family's, friends are all reporters. So it's been my life since I was probably three or four years old, I would say. And so I have a perspective on it that it's not totally unique, but it's a big part of my life sort of watching the changes in the business. Yeah, I want to talk about how it has changed and maybe changing just by the hour now, because we have this kind of this horrible integration that we've all witnessed of journalism and social media and politics. That the politics side since Trump just seems unrecognizable to many of us. So I'm just wondering the thing that many of us are trying to get a handle on here is how we can have a sane discussion about facts and values, about what's actually going on in the world and what we should do about it. When our epistemology appears to have been shattered by partisan politics and new technologies and new perverse incentives in media, we just appear to be driving ourselves crazy. How do you view it as somebody who at least has some distant memory of pre Internet journalism and who's now working as a journalist full time? Yeah, I'm actually writing a book about this right now, and it's called The Fairway. It's sort of like a rethink of Manufacturing Consent, and it's a lot about what's gone on in the last three or four decades with the business. And I think you hit on a really important word when he talked about incentives. The financial incentives in our business have really gone haywire. And with the collision of the Internet and this business, we're now more or less all completely at the upper levels in the media and the big corporate outlets. We're basically in the business of telling our audiences what they want to hear. And there's a driving pressure on journalists to make audiences happy in a way that didn't exist probably a generation ago. Almost everybody now almost all journalists have a social media presence. They're all, whether they do so in their day job or not, they're op ed writers to a degree. And this is really filtered into the way we cover everything. And it's gotten dramatically worse since Trump arrived because he's such a polarizing figure that now there's really only two kinds of media, in big media, there's pro Trump media and there's antitrump media, and we basically market those two brands and it's very difficult to write about anything else. I've really struggled with it because in my career I really did a lot of things that were not about partisan politics, that were about bipartisan issues or things that had bipartisan causes, like the financial crisis or military contracting or whatever it is. But you can't do that today. It's very hard to market your work if you don't have an overt Trump angle on it. And as you say, it's becoming more and more pronounced, I think, by the minute. And that's difficult. It's hard not to be part of the problem in the act of responding to the problem, however constructively you think you're doing that because it is. There's something so demeaning about what is now normal, and just to be covering Trump all the time, just politically, journalistically, on social media the status quo is so eclipsing of deeper possibilities and it's just so magnifying of what's petty and superficial. And yet to try to make sense of it or improve it is to be dragged into the same swamp. And it reminds me of the fear as many people had of the Large Hadron Collider, that there was a fear that some future high energy experiment in physics might rip a hole in the fabric of space time and destroy the world. It just might open up a mini black hole that would swallow everything. Right. Or a nuclear explosion would ignite the atmosphere or something like that. Right? Right. However physically plausible those fears have been at any point, I actually feel something similar every time I turn on the news. What I'm afraid of and responding to is not the threat of nuclear war or cyber terrorism or climate change or any, you know, real problem. It's this high energy experiment of our own banality and childishness in the face of these real challenges that eclipses any prospect of thinking about these challenges intelligently. I mean, like yesterday we're, you know, we're recording this a day after we had Kanye West and, and Trump in the Oval Office, you know, where Trump got to look like the same one for minutes at a stretch. And it's just at this moment where human history is an episode of reality television and it's so appalling, and yet to even talk about it is to be, in some ways, just participating in this circus. It's very hard to see how, as a journalist, you thread this needle where you again, you have to choose how much time to spend on this freak show, which is the place that is either determining the course of human events or just preventing us from dealing with problems that are just not going to go away on their own magically. I spent a lot of time sort of warning about this in the last twelve years. One of the things that I do a lot of at Rolling Stone. They have me covering the campaigns every four years, so I'm now going to start my fifth in a few months, unfortunately. You're starting this early? Yeah. No, of course that's one of the problems, is that it starts earlier and earlier each cycle. But I've been saying for a couple of election cycles now that we were turning the electoral process into a reality show and we were making it more and more vacuous with each progressive cycle. And the media was sort of celebrating its role as essentially judges in a kind of beauty pageant. We had all these terms and code words that we used to identify people who we thought were appropriate presidential candidates. So if you saw somebody described as pointed in a campaign story, that was a bad sign. That was the press's way of saying that this person is going to be offensive or difficult for Middle America to swallow if we use the word nuance, that was a good word. Of course, there was the whole contest over which candidate you most want to have a beer with. We invented all of these little ridiculous kind of reality shows sort of events. Which one is the most tough on defense, which one is the most is the warmest and the vacuousness of it. I think people started to rebel against it. I started to notice, I think, in the Romney Obama election, that people were just really impatient with that kind of coverage. And when Trump came along, I recognized right away that this is going to be a problem because he was, in a way, the campaign was a bad reality show with bad actors, and here was an experienced reality TV performer who was going to come in and make a complete circus out of it. And the problem I knew from the very start that the problem was going to be that the commercial press was not going to be able to resist that narrative. And I wrote about this from the start, that Trump was perfectly designed to walk through the front door of a process that had already been deeply flawed before he even got on the scene. And that's exactly what happened. I lost a little bit of faith throughout the course of the election that I initially thought that he was going to win against all odds, but then I lost a little bit of confidence in that. I didn't want him to win, of course, but I saw right away that he was going to fit like a glove into what we'd created. Yeah, I've been thinking of him and talking about him as an evil chauncey gardener right. Where rather than based on his own talents and genius and strategy and vision, he was the perfect person to exploit a very flawed system and situation where his own personal flaws, his narcissism, his crassness, everything that's wrong with him as a human fit like a perfect key into the lock of the present moment. Maybe I'm not giving him quite as much credit as I should be for being a talented Demagogue, but I really do think that just being the right ugly character at the right moment explains a lot of his success. Oh, absolutely. And I've talked about this, actually, oddly enough, with pro wrestlers, because one of the first things I noticed in the last election was Trump was basically doing a heel act. If you if you watch any wrestling, he was casting all of his opponents as the baby face, you know, the the good guy. And if you watch any WWE, you know, the audience is always cheer when the sort of gorgeous George character gets a chair across the face. And that's what Trump did with people like Jeb Bush. He made them offended. He attacked their families, their mothers, their wives, and they didn't know how to handle it and responded in many ways as just basically any sane person would, instead of acting upset and outraged. But that but Trump made a mockery of it, and he understood that the spectacle was more important than what he was actually the actual words that he was saying, and the cameras would be drawn more to him than they would be to his opponents. And that's A, why he got so much more coverage than everybody else, but B, if you watch the debates, especially on the Republican side, early on, he just sort of looked physically bigger than everybody else on the stage because he just had such a dominating media presence, and he knew exactly how to control that WWE dynamic in each of these events. And he did it with us in the press, too. Not to drone on about this, but I remember being in New Hampshire and he would point to us, we're all standing behind the rope line with our notebooks, and he would say things like, look at them. Look at those bloodsuckers. They didn't think I could win. They're elitist, they doubted me. They hate you. And the crowd would physically turn in our direction and start hissing and booing. And I realized Trump is taking this incredibly boring, stealthifying, stump speech format and he's turning it into this intimate, menacing television event. And that was going to fly, and it did. And that's why everybody just gave him so much attention. He crushed the ratings, and it was just a perfect confluence of all these factors that made him, his, his celebrity grow during that time. Well, I don't want us to get fully pulled by the the tractor beam that is Trump. I mean, I'm sure he'll come up again. And I think when we talk about I mean, it's no secret that you and I are about as critical of Trump as any two people that can be found. But I think in talking about this phenomenon and the underlying politics, I think we should try to bend over backwards to be sympathetic to the millions of people who voted for him. I mean, just to put the best possible steel man construe on the reasons for that. Yeah, I do. Yeah, definitely, go ahead. Yeah, I'm sensitive to the the charge that at least on this topic in particular, I'm in an echo chamber or amplifying one. And I mean, the truth is, I think there really is truly zero partisanship in my criticism of Trump. I think virtually everyone I've had on this podcast to talk about Trump is a Republican who is criticizing Trump. And I have very uncharitable things to say about the Clintons as well. So there's just a unique problem with him as a person which is motivating me to rail about him as much as I do. But let's just back up for a second and talk about how we got here. Journalistically because a couple of days before this theatrical event in the Oval Office with Kanye West, we have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releasing a fairly dire report, which gets, perhaps predictably now, very little oxygen in the press. And half of America probably thinks climate change is a hoax. And we have a president who will say that it's a hoax. Journalistically how did we get to a situation where it is so difficult to define fake news clearly enough to even address the problem? And we're now living in an ambient level of conspiracy theories and unwillingness to engage in the case of climate change, a fairly impressive scientific consensus about the basic problem, and yet journalism can't seem to get a purchase on it. How is this where we are? Well, I think in that case, it's almost entirely a financial issue. Back in the day, maybe during the Fairness Doctrine years, when there was more attention paid to the public interest standard, I think we were raising a whole generation that doesn't know some of the history here, that the press originally was sort of a grand bargain, right? The government would lease the public airwaves to radio and television stations. And as part of the sort of negotiation, the private media companies were obligated to create programming that was in the public interest and convenience. And for a long time there was an unwritten rule that the news could be a loss leader, right, that you could make your money on sports and sitcoms and entertainment and whatever else, and the news didn't have to make money. And that change, that began to change with some very profitable programs. I think 60 Minutes was one of the first news magazine programs to actually make money. And then in the we started to see this phenomenon of companies like Fox starting to actually make significant amounts of money in ways that they didn't have to before because they were being more overtly commercial than they used to. And so it's hard for people to understand, but I watched this journalist just sort of grow up with this idea of what is and what isn't a story. It's something that's more by smell than by discussion. And back in the day, I think reporters would have placed more emphasis on how important a story is and in deciding whether or not something is newsworthy. Now we probably are whether consciously or not consciously thinking more about what's going to sell more when we talk about what stores are going to COVID what we're going to pitch to our editors and that sort of thing and so climate change is just a tough sell. I've done a very few stories on that but I've done stories on topics that are like that that are difficult sells and it's really hard to get traction. I think the hardest part is you might be able to get your own audience interested for a little while, but the hard part is getting everybody else to pick it up. And that's really the difficult part. Right now. In order to affect anything, you need the whole news cycle. You need everybody piling on. And that doesn't really happen with that kind of story very often unless there are powerful interests behind trying to get something, a lot of ink, it just won't happen. And Mother Earth doesn't have that kind of pull, unfortunately. Yeah with climate change you sort of have every variable working against it because it is this slow moving problem which is in each specific instance something that you can't at least from a scientific point of view confidently say is happening as theorized. So you can't say this hurricane is the result of climate change. You can just say that this is general trend of worsening storms that we would expect but you can never point to the devastation from last week and say there you go, climate change. Or at least if you do you'll have all the caveats of scientists working in the background to kind of undercut you. So it's a hard problem because to make it journalistically sexy enough it's certainly tempting to distort the underlying science and then when scientists or people like Al Gore get caught for doing that then it sets the whole conversation back. Yeah you need to hook right to sell any news story so people are going to look for some kind of event, something historic maybe water levels rising to a certain degree that had never been reached before temperatures getting hotter than they ever had before. I used to live in Uzbekistan, and I remember walking in what used to be the Aral Sea, and it's not there anymore. And so people look for hoax like that to do environmental stories. But if you're trying to compete against Kanye West, giving Trump a hug in the White House, that's just not an easy pitch. It's just not going to get the same kind of clicks and eyeballs, even from people who claim to be interested in the topic. Believe it or not that's one of the reasons why in my own work I've had to resort to some pretty weird tactics to try to get people interested in things like the financial crisis or Iraq war. Use storytelling techniques, humor, make black hats, white hats, make characters out of the main people who figure in the story, and you feel not so great about that sometimes, but that's necessary in order to get people eyeballs trained on important subjects. So it seems that journalism has now essentially monetized domestic political conflict more than anything else, especially when you add the I guess there are a few rungs on the ladder here, which I know you've written about. I think the first is probably conservative talk radio and Fox News and 24 hours cable news cycles, which just demand a kind of endless polarizing conversation about politics. But then when you add the Internet and social media and the micro targeting of groups with Facebook ads and we're now monetizing every individual's confirmation bias and addiction to outrage, do you see a way of breaking this spell? What's the exit from this? I don't know. I mean, I'm in the middle in that book that I'm writing, The Fairway, right now. I just wrote this thing called The Ten Rules of Hate, which are it's explicitly about how we monetize political division, how we train audiences to be sort of pre angry and get them addicted to conflict. Pre angry? Yeah. Pre angry is a great phrase. Everybody knows that we do it, and we know that we do it. It goes back a long way. First of all, I think people have to realize they have to think about the logistical challenge of filling all those hours on 24 hours cable. And when that first happened, the news had a very difficult time making all those hours work. What they basically did is they would do a newscast and have it on a loop every hour or so. But that doesn't work in modern day media. You need something new pretty much constantly. And so what works and what they found over the years in terms of what works to fill all the hours and what gets people's attention the most, it's either an ongoing crash kind of a story like the cursed disaster or a baby down the well or a storm or something like that, where they can update it every minute. Or it's something like the presidential campaign that has 18 months of scheduled conflicts and you can create lots and lots of graphic doodads to talk about your predictions and you can turn it into a kind of sports format where people argue constantly. But the easiest way to fill all that time is just to do the sort of crossfire format where you have one person on one side, one person on the other side, and they argue. And the show doesn't really work if they try to reach an accommodation during the show. It has to be conflict. If you think about what Crossfire does and Saturn Live was lampooning this way back in the 70s with point counterpoint. The idea that people would sort of dress up in shirts and ties and scream insults at each other over things that have nothing to do with their lives, with their lives. It's totally crazy, but we do it constantly. And that format works so well as a way to fill the hours that it went from being a variety show that we tuned into occasionally to being the entire news landscape. And we have some channels that are from the left and some channels that are from the right, and they're just lobbing grenades at each other constantly. And the additional factor that you talked about with the Internet now means that all those algorithms are going to be searching for audiences who are already sort of preselected to agree with certain topics. So when you create a story about how you just say Trump is awful, the 101 ways Trump is awful or whatever, right? There's going to be an algorithm that's going to identify all the people who are going to like that story or are likely to like that story, and it's going to feed it to them through the Facebook feed and through various other social media methods. And so there's all these commercial polls that push us to try to create that kind of content, which is just about feeding people's hate reflexes. And it's really unfortunate because what ends up happening is that people like me who, when we come across a topic that isn't partisan or isn't going to make you angry, but if you cover it correctly, it's going to make you maybe think about your own culpability. Or it's going to make your readers not so pleased with the politicians that they vote for. There's kind of an internal discouragement from doing that kind of material. I mean, I'm sure I've heard you talk about how a certain segment of your audience turned out to be Trump supporters. It's difficult right, went to, to do content that maybe, you know, is going to turn those people off and that's I think that's unconscious. That's something that's unconscious and going on at the unconscious level with a lot of reporters these days. It's one of those situations where incentives are more powerful than what most people at least can consciously will themselves to do. You can keep your eye on the public good a fair amount, but if all of your incentives, especially your incentives for being able to pay your rent and advance your career, are run in the other way, it's not hard to guess what's going to win there, at least for most people. I noticed you were fairly critical of the New Yorker Festival. Beyond there just disinviting Steve Bannon, which we can talk about. I think you and I had a very similar take on that, but you seemed much more critical than I would tend to be in this environment just around their business model. They were somehow prostituting journalism by creating events that people would pay a fair amount of money to attend. But again, one of the main problems from my point of view is we're in an environment now where virtually everyone expects to get their news for free. So if The New Yorker can create a yearly conference that's expensive, that people actually want to pay for to see their favorite writers or whoever get up on stage and talk, why be skeptical of that project, given the financial contingencies now with journalism, just trying to figure out how to stay in business? You're right. I mean, I was probably unfair about that. I just kind of reacted to that whole thing as somebody who's just sort of been in the business for a long time. It would be tough for me to do that kind of event. And I don't know, I just have a sort of an old school take on that. It just feels kind of odd to me for some reason. But I understand it. It's a way to make money now, and it's proven, I guess, to be pretty successful. And people do want to meet their favorite writers and pundits and that sort of thing. I guess it's analogous to what happened, or what happened in the music industry, where musicians can't make nearly as much money actually selling their music so they have to tour. And the problem for writers has always been that there's no real analog for touring for most writers. Some can have careers as speakers. But it seems like this New Yorker Festival, which I've never attended, so I'm just guessing, but it seems like this is a micro example of a magazine figuring out some touring component to its business model, which obviously not every magazine can do, but that part seems good to me, provided there's actually a market for it. What really was objectively not good was how they handled the Steve Bannon situation. I don't know if you want to give your I've already spoken about that briefly on the podcast, but I don't know if you want to give me your take on what happened there. Well, I I do think that interviewing Steve Bannon is totally a legitimate thing to do. And when I first heard about the controversy, I i guess I didn't understand what the New Yorker Festival was. And I should probably just back up and say again, I grew up with people in an era when the sales people, the ad people, were literally not allowed in the same newsroom as the reporters. Like there was a Chinese wall between the press and the business side, and we just didn't have to think about it. And so the idea of the festival, I think from an old school perspective, it just feels a little weird to me. But if you add the component of we're going to. Charge an extra special high amount of money to bring Steve Bannon in so that everybody can gawk at the public spectacle of him on stage. I don't know if that's basically monetizing the Trump phenomenon in a way that's a little bit too direct for my taste. I understand why they did it. Some of the things that David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said about we need to challenge people who are powerful, and all of that is valid. And in fact, one of the things that I wrote about was that if you read the Michael Wolf book and there's all these amazing questions that I would like to ask somebody like Steve Ben and what was he talking about when he was cheering the nomination of a money laundering prosecutor to the Mueller's team? And also about his sort of strategic decisions during the campaign? All that stuff is interesting, and it's worth exploring, but in the context of that of that festival, it felt like a little bit too commercialized for me. I don't know. What did you think about that? Well, you just brought up two interesting points that are bigger than the festival. One is just the general phenomenon of wondering who is worth talking to? This is something I've struggled with openly on the podcast. Is it okay to, as it's said, give a platform to Person X when there's interesting differences of opinion to be aired in that conversation? The other thing you brought up is just monetizing the Trump phenomenon in general. Let's just take that piece first. It seems to me that journalism in general must have benefited from Trump, right? I'm wondering if there's a kind of a perverse incentive now that has crept in where this is the best thing that's ever happened to CNN or any of these other outlets. Has anyone quantified just how good Trump has been for journalism? Yes, there have been lots of reports about this. The numbers are historic. Typically, the networks, in the year after a presidential election, the cable networks anyway, see significant drops in ratings. That didn't happen with CNN. CNN, I think, in the first year of the Trump presidency, made a billion dollars profit. And there was a really interesting phenomenon for me about that, which was poll after poll showed that there was less trust of the media than ever, including on both sides of the spectrum, among Republicans and Democrats, but particularly among conservatives. But the media is being consumed more than ever. So what does that mean? That means that we're starting to eat into the entertainment world's budget, basically, because people aren't really consuming us as a product that they trust. They're consuming us as some other kind of product that serves some other kind of purpose. And that's pretty weird. I mean, all the networks have been just amazing ratings ever since Trump has been in office. And that's one of the reasons why I have this queasy feeling about a lot of Trump coverage. Originally when he first came on the scene, there was a lot of sort of snickering, and let's give this clown a little airtime because we know it's going to get ratings. And then when people felt bad about it and they realized that they were helping him get to the presidency, they sort of started to add this. Instead of a million hours of Trump, it's a million hours of Trump is bad. I think it's basically the same thing, and I really worry about that. I think that's not a positive phenomenon for the press because it's so easy now to make money with Trump content, and that's a bad habit for the press to break. Yeah. Back to the platforming thing. I'd love to talk about the Nefarious podcast. Guest or interview? Guest. When I've described this on my podcast, I've talked about it in terms of this uncanny Valley phenomenon where if someone is bad enough, then it's just a straightforward decision. I guess the clearest case is you could sit down and talk to Hitler. That would be interesting. But to talk to Richard Spencer is to give a platform to an awful person with his awful ideas. And I just wonder how you again, I totally agree with you about Steve Bannon. He's not Richard Spencer. I think he's unfairly slimed as being that sort of right wing xenophobe or racist. And he's someone who already has a platform and he's already used it to great effect. So he's somebody who has made the news and in large measure is responsible for who's currently in the Oval Office, so he seems worth talking to. And the idea that David Remnick could not have performed his side of that interview in a way that would have credibly undercut bannon's bad ideas, insofar as they are bad, is just to put so little faith in Remnick. As a journalist and in just the possibility of shedding sunlight on bad ideas, that it made everyone on the disinvite side of the ledger look craven. And so it was just the worst possible outcome because it bannon gets to say that he destroyed the left without even showing up, right? Yeah. I don't know. The deep platforming movement on campuses is something that I've never covered. I've never had any reason to really look at it. But in journalism, I don't see that it really has a place because the standard is just is the person newsworthy or not? Do they have something that we want to know or not to talk about? And in the case of Bannon, it's easily true that he's newsworthy. There are a million things that I would want to ask Steve Bannon, and I understand the objections. I mean, I heard a lot of them when I wrote about this, that there's nothing you're going to learn from Steve Bannon. He's a racist and a white supremacist, and that's all you need to know. Well, I don't think that's true. I think Donald Trump would not be president right now if it weren't for Bannon, and his tactics were very successful, among other things, in conning a whole lot of journalists like myself, and I would love to learn from him what his thinking was throughout that process in the summer of 2016. I'm sure there are a million things that have happened in the White House that, if he were inclined to talk about, I would love to hear about. He's a newsworthy person. Spencer that's a little bit different because there's very little news value in what he's done. I think if you're a big corporate media outlet and you're covering spencer you're basically just giving him free advertising. I don't love that, but you're absolutely right. We interview all kinds of crazy people, and we don't think about whether they're good people or bad people. At least I never have. I just think about whether they're newsworthy or not. I mean, would you interview bin Laden? Of course you would. Yes. I found that whole thing really troubling, and I worry about it creeping into reporting. Because if you add the requirement that reporters now have to sanitize the content for audiences and add all these indicators so that audiences know that this or that idea is bad first of all, that's showing a remarkable, like, lack of confidence in your audience's ability to understand things. And secondly, that's just not what we do, where we're in the business of sort of finding out what happened and understanding things and letting the world do with that information what it will. I hope we're not in the business of making political judgments about people in the same way that a campus administrator might have to take into consideration when they're deciding whether or not to invite somebody or something like that. Would you interview Alex Jones? Yeah, I probably would. What do you think about I know you've written about this, but what do you think about the censorship of him by the various social media channels that have censored him? Was it all of them, or is he still on Twitter? I know he was pulled down from YouTube. I'm not sure. I know that he's gone for most of them. How do you view that phenomenon? And would he be someone you would certainly get a lot of grief for speaking to him, but what do you think about the merits of speaking to him? Well, on the censorship angle, I thought it was really interesting because I think people didn't understand that moment all that well. We have had in this country for a long time, since the early sixty s, a way of dealing with bad speech. And the standard has been new York Times v. Sullivan. Right. We've decided what's liable, what's slander, and the courts sort that out. And it's been a very effective system for preventing people from lying or publishing damaging information. The courts typically react pretty swiftly. And that private system has been a great shield to people like me. Because if I want to write about a company like Goldman Sachs or something like that, I know that in order for them to successfully sue me, that I have to get things wrong, that it's going to go to a courtroom and not some private executive somewhere to make that decision. And so the idea that we're going to switch and now have a new standard where the decision about how we deal with bad speech is going to be dealt with behind closed doors in these sort of gigantic transnational companies, and it's not going to be public, and you're not going to really have a say in it if they decide to remove you from the platform. I really worry about that. I think, as I said when I wrote about this, to me it looks like Jones falls under the category of somebody who could have been successfully sued on a number of occasions and probably would be out of business. In the old days, but instead because he was so unpopular and he's so noxious to a lot of people. When they removed him from all those platforms, everybody cheered. And I thought that was a really dangerous moment, because we're sort of formally switching from one enforcement mechanism to another, and this other enforcement mechanism is kind of scary to me. So I worry about that a lot for sure. What do you do with the argument that these are private platforms? These are essentially publishers that by this argument would be forced to publish ideas that are noxious, false and damaging. In the case of Jones, damaging to the bereaved parents of murdered children is part of the problem here. That Facebook and YouTube and these other platforms are so big now as to be not best thought of as private companies, but they're essentially public utilities or just common space that a person shouldn't be barred from inhabiting. Well, if you just take just the two companies, Facebook and Google, that's where above 70% of if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org. You./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. OK, jumping right into it today. Today I'm speaking with Eric Schmidt. Eric is a technologist entrepreneur and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001 and served as its CEO and Chairman from 2001 to 2011 and as Executive Chairman and Technical Advisor thereafter. In 2017, he cofounded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that bets early on exceptional people who are helping to make the world better. He is the host of Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, his own podcast, and most recently, he is the coauthor of a new book, The Age of AI and Our Human Future. And that is the topic of today's conversation. We cover how AI is affecting the foundations of our knowledge and how it raises questions of existential risk. So we talk about the good and the bad of AI, both narrow AI and ultimately AGI Artificial General Intelligence. We discuss breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals and other good things, but we also talk about cyber war and autonomous weapons, and how our thinking about containing the risk here by analogy to the proliferation of nuclear weapons probably needs to be revised. Anyway, an important conversation, which I hope you find useful. And I bring you Eric Schmidt. I am here with Eric Schmidt. Eric, thanks for joining me. Glad to be with you. So I think we have a heart out in an hour here. So amazingly, that's a short podcast for me, so there's going to be a spirit of urgency hanging over the place and we will be efficient. And covering the fascinating book that you have written with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttonlocker. That's right. And Dr. Kissinger, of course, is this former secretary of state. And Dan Huttenlocker is now the dean of artificial intelligence and computer science at the Schwarzman center at MIT. He's a proper computer scientist. Yeah. And that book is The Age of AI and Our Human Future, where you cover most of what I have said about AI thus far. And every case where I have worried about our possible AI future has been focused on the topic of AGI Artificial General Intelligence, which you discuss briefly in the book, but it's not your main focus. So I thought maybe we could save that for the end because I would love to get your take on AGI, but there are far more near term concerns here and considerations that we could cover and you are quite well placed to COVID them, because, if I'm not mistaken, you ran Google for what was it, ten years? That's correct. What was your background before that? How did you come to be the CEO of Google? Well, I'm a computer scientist. I have a PhD in the area, and I worked for 45 years in tech. In one way or the other, whole bunch of companies. Larry and Sergey brought me in as the early CEO of the company, and we built it together. After a decade, I became chairman, Larry became CEO, and then he replaced himself with Sundar, who is now doing a phenomenal job at Google. So I'd say, collectively, this group, of which I'm a member, built one of the great companies, and I'm really proud of that. Yeah. And obviously, Google is quite involved in developing AI. I just saw just the other day that there's a new I think it's a 540,000,000,000 parameter language model that is beating the average human at something like 150 cognitive tests now. And it seems like the light is at the end of the tunnel there. It's just going to be a larger model that's going to beat every human at those same tasks. But before we get into some of the details here, I just want to organize our general approach to this. There are three questions that Kant asked in his Critique of Pure Reason, I think it was, which seem unusually relevant to the development of AI. The first is what can we know? The second is what should we do? And the third is, what is it reasonable to hope for? And I think those really do capture almost every aspect of concern here, because as you point out in the book, AI really promises to, and it has already begun to shift the foundations of human knowledge. So the question of what we can know and how we can know it is enormously salient. Now, and maybe we can talk about some of those examples, but obviously this question of what should we do and what can we reasonably hope for captures the risks we're running in developing these systems. And we're running these risks well short of producing anything like artificial general intelligence. And it's interesting that we're on a path now where we're really not free to decline to produce this technology. I mean, to my eye, there's really no break to pull. We're in a kind of AI arms race now, and the question is how to put that race for more intelligence on a footing that is not running cataclysmic risk for us. So before we jump into the details, I guess I'd like to get your general thoughts on how you view the stakes here and where you view the field to be at the moment. Well, of course, we wrote the book Age of AI precisely to help answer the questions you're describing, which are perfectly cast and what's happened in the book which is written roughly a year ago and then published. We described a number of examples to illustrate. The .1 is the development of new moves in the game of go, which is 2500 years, which were discovered by computer, which humans had never discovered. It's hard to imagine that humans wouldn't have discovered these strategies, but they didn't. And that calls the question of are there things which AI can learn that humans cannot master? That's a question. The second example that we use is the development of a new drug called Halison, which is a broad scale spectrum antibiotic, which could not be done by humans. But a set of neuroscientists biologists and computer scientists put together a set of programs that ultimately searched through 100 million different compounds and came up with candidates that were then subsequently tested, advancing drugs at an enormous rate. That's another category of success in AI. And then the third is what you've already mentioned, which is large language models. And we profile in the book GPT-3, which is the predecessor of the one you described. And it's eerie. On the back cover, our book, we say to the GPT-3 computer, are you capable of human reasoning? And it answers, no, I am not. You may wonder why I give you that answer. And the answer is that you are a human reasoning machine, whereas I am a language model that's not been taught how to do that. Now, is that awareness or is that clever mimicry? We don't know. But each of these three examples show the potential to answer Kant's questions what can we know? What will happen? What can we do about it? Since then, this past few weeks, we've seen the announcement that you mentioned of this enormous large language model which can beat humans on many things. And we've also seen something called Dal E, which is a text to art program. You describe roughly what you want and it can generate art for you. Now, these are the beginnings of the impact of artificial intelligence on us as humans. So Dr. Kissinger, Dan and myself, when we looked at those, we thought, what happens to society when you have these kinds of intelligence? Now, they're not human intelligence, they're different kinds of intelligence in everyday life. And we talk about all the positives of which there are incredible positives. Better materials, better drugs, more efficient systems, better understanding, better monitoring of the Earth, additional solutions for climate change. There's a long, long list which I can go through. Very, very exciting. And indeed, in my personal philanthropy, we are working really hard to fund AI enabled science discoveries. We recently announced a grant structure with a guy named James Mannika, friend of mine, of $125,000,000 to actually go and fund research on the really hard problems in AI, the ones that you're mentioning and others, and also the economic impacts and so forth. Because I think people don't really know. The real question is what happens when these systems become more commonplace. Dr. Kissinger says if you look at history when a system that is not understandable is imposed on people, they do one of two things they either invent it as a religion or they fight it with guns. So my concern, and I'll say it very directly, is we're playing with the information space of humans. We're experimenting at scale without a set of principles as to what we want to do. Do we care more about freedom? Do we care more about efficiency? Do we care about education and so forth. And Dr. Kissinger would say the problem is that these decisions are being made by technical people who are ignorant of the philosophical questions that you so ably asked. And I agree with him speaking as an example of that. So we recommend, and indeed I'm trying to now fund that people begin in a multidisciplinary way to discuss the implications of this. What happens to national security? What happens to military intelligence? What happens to social media? What happens to your children when your child's best friend is a computer? And for the audience who might be still thinking about the killer robot we're not building killer robots and I hope we never do. This is really about information systems that are human like that are learning. They're dynamic and they're emergent and they're imprecise being used and imposed on humans around the world. That process is unstoppable. It's simply too many people working on it too many ways in which people are going to manipulate it including for hostile reasons, too many businesses being built and too much success for some of the early work. Yeah, I guess if I can just emphasize that point, the unstoppability is pretty interesting because it's just anchored to this basic fact that intelligence is almost by definition the most valuable thing on Earth. Right? And if we can get more of it, we're going to, and we clearly can. And all of these narrow intelligences we've built thus far, all that are effective, that come to market, that we pour resources into are superhuman, more or less right out of the gate, right? It's not a question of human level. Intelligence is a bit of a mirage because the moment we get something that's general it's going to be superhuman and so we can leave the generality aside. All of these piecemeal intelligences are superhuman. And the example you give of the new antibiotic Hallison it's fascinating because it's not just a matter of doing human work faster, if I understand what happened in that case. This is an AI detecting patterns and relationships in molecules already known to be safe and efficacious as antibiotics and detecting new properties that human beings very likely would never have conceived of and may in fact be opaque to the people who built the AI and may remain opaque. I mean, one of the issues you just raised is the issue of transparency. Many of these systems are built in such a way as to be black boxes. And we don't know how the AI is doing what it's doing in any specific way. It's just training against data and against its own performance so as to produce a better and better result, which qualifies as intelligent and even superhumanly so. And yet it may remain a black box. Maybe we can just close the loop on that specific problem here. Are you concerned that transparency is a necessity when decision making is important? I mean, just imagine the case where we have something like an AI oracle that we are convinced makes better decisions than any person or even any group of people, but we don't actually know the details of how it's making those decisions. Right. You can just multiply examples as you like, but just questions of who should get out of prison, the likelihood of recidivism in the case of any person, or who's likely to be more violent at the level of conviction. Right. What should the prison sentence be? It's very easy to see that if we're shunting that to a black box, people are going to get fairly alarmed that in any differences in outcome that are not transparent. Perhaps you have other examples of concern, but do you think transparency is something that one question is, is it technically feasible to render black boxes transparent when it matters? And two, is transparency as important as we intuitively may think it is? Well, I wonder how important transparency is for the simple fact that we have teenagers among our midst and the teenagers cannot explain themselves at all. And yet we tolerate their behavior with some restrictions because they're not full adults. But we wouldn't let a teenager fly an airplane or operate on a patient. So I think a pretty simple model is that at the moment, these systems cannot explain how to became to their decision. There are many people working on the explainability problem. Until then, I think it's going to be really important that these systems not be used in what I'm going to call life safety situations. And this creates all sorts of problems. For example, in automated war, automated conflict, cyber war, those sorts of things where the speed of decision making is faster than what humans can. What happens if it makes a mistake? And so again, we're at the beginning of this process, and most people, including myself, believe that the explainability problem and the bias problems will get resolved because there's just too much money, too many people working on it, maybe at some cost, but we'll get there. That's historically how these things work. You start off with stuff that works well enough, but it shows a hint of the future, and then it gets industrialized. I'm actually much more focused on what's it like to be human when you have these specialized systems floating around. My favorite example here is Facebook, where they changed their feed to amp it using AI. And the AI that they built was around engagement. And we know from a great deal of social science that outrage creates more engagement, and so therefore there's more outrage on your feed. Now, that was a clearly deliberate decision on part of Facebook, presumably thought it was a good product idea, but it also maximized their revenue. That's a pretty big social experiment given the number of users that they have, which is not done with an understanding, in my view, of the impact of political polarization. Now you sit there and you go, okay, well, he doesn't work at Facebook. He doesn't really understand, but many, many people have commented on this problem. This is an image of what happens in a world where all of the information around you can be boosted or manipulated by AI to sell to you, to anchor you, to change your opinion, and so forth. So we're going to face some interesting questions in the information space, the television and movies and things you see online and so forth. Do there need to be restrictions on how AI uses the information it has about you to pitch to you, to market to you, to entertain you? These are questions. We don't have answers. But it makes perfect sense that in the industrialization of these tools, the tools that I'm describing, which were invented in places like google and Facebook, will become available to everyone and every government. So another example is a simple one, which is the kid is a two year old and gets a toy, and the toy gets upgraded every year, and the kid gets smarter. The kid is now twelve and ten years from now there's a great toy. And this toy is smart enough in non human terms to be able to watch television and decide if the kid likes the show. So the toy is watching the television, and the toy says to the kid, I don't like this show, knowing that the kid's not going to like it. And the kid goes, I agree with you. Now, is that okay? Probably. Well, what happens if that same system that's also learning learns something that's not true? And it goes, kid, I have a secret. And the kid goes, tell me, tell me, tell me. And the secret is something which is prejudicial or false or bad or something like that. We don't know how to describe, especially for young people, the impact of these systems on their cognitive development. Now, we have a long history in America of having school boards and textbooks which are approved at the state level. Are the states going to monitor this? And you sit and you say, well, no parent would allow that, but let's say that the normal behavior of this toy is smart enough, understands the kid well enough to know the kid's not good at multiplication. So the kid's board, and then the toy says, I think we should play a game, kid. Goes great. And of course it's a game which strengthens his or her multiplication capability. So on the one hand, you want these systems to make people smarter, make them develop, make them more serious adults, make the adults more productive. Another example would be my physics friends. They just want a system to read all the physics books every night and make suggestions to them. Well, the physicists are adults who can deal with this, but what about kids? So you're going to end up in a situation at least with kids and with elderly who are isolated where these tools are going to have an out of proportion impact on society as they perceive it. We've never run that experiment dynamic emergent and not precise. I'm not worried about airplanes being flown by AI because they're not going to be reliable enough to do it for a while. Now, we should also say for the listeners here that we're talking about what a term which is generally known as narrow AI. It's very specific and we're using specific examples drug discovery, education, entertainment. But the eventual state of AI is called general intelligence, where you get human kind of reasoning. In the book, what we describe that is the point where the computer can set its own objective. And today the good news is the computer can't choose its objective at some point. That will not be true. Yeah, well, hopefully we'll get to AGI at the end of this hour. But I think we should talk about the good and the bad in that order and maybe just spend a few minutes on the good because the good is all too obvious. Again, intelligence is the most valuable thing on Earth. It's the thing that gives us every other thing we want and it's the thing that safeguards everything we have. And if there are problems we can't solve, well, then we can't solve them. But if there are problems that can be solved, the way we will solve them is through greater uses of our intelligence. And insofar as we can leverage artificial intelligence to solve those problems, we will do that more or less, regardless of the attendant risks. And that's the problem because the attendant risks are increasingly obvious and it seems not at all trivial. And we've already proven we're capable of implementing massive technological change without really thinking about the consequences at all. You cite the massive psychological experiment we've performed on all of humanity with no one really consenting. That is social media. And it's you know, the the effects are ambiguous at best. I mean, there's some obviously bad effects and it's not even straightforward to say that democracy or even civilization can survive contact with social media. It remains to be seen, given how divisive some of its effects are. I consider social media to be far less alarming than the prospect of having an ongoing nuclear doctrine anchored to a proliferating regime of cyber espionage, cyber terrorism, cyber war, all of which will be improved massively by layering AI onto all of that. So before we jump into the bad, which is really capturing my attention, is there anything specifically you want to say about the good here? I mean, if this goes well, what are you hoping for? What are you expecting? Well, there are so many positive examples that we honestly just don't have time to make a list. We give you a few. In physics and math, the physicists and mathematicians have worked out the formulas for how the world works, at least at the scientific level. But many of their calculations are not computable by modern computers. They're just too complicated. An example is how do clouds actually work is a function of something called the Navier Stokes equations, which for a normal size cloud would take 100 million years for a computer to figure out. But using an AI system and there's a group at Caltech doing this, they can come up with a simulation of the things that they care about. In other words, the AI provides enough accuracy in order to solve the more general climate modeling problem. If you look at quantum chemistry, which is sort of how does how do chemical bonds work together? Not computable by modern methods, however, AI can provide enough of a simulation that we can figure out how these molecules bind, which is the Halsen example in drug discovery. We know enough about biology that we can basically predict that if you do these compounds with this antibody, we can make it stronger, we can make it weaker and so forth in the computer, and then you go reproduce it in the lab. There's example after example where AI is being used from existing data to simulate a non computable function in science, and you say, what's he talking about? I'm talking about the fact that the scientists have been stuck for decades because they know what they want to do, but they couldn't get through this barrier that unleashes new materials, new drugs, new forms of steel, new forms of concrete and so forth and so on. It also helps us with climate change, for example, because climate change is really about energy and CO2 emissions and so forth. These new surfaces, discoveries and so forth will make a material difference. And I'm talking about really significant numbers. So that's an example. Another example is what's happening with these large language models that you mentioned earlier, that people are figuring out a way to put a conversational system in front of it so that you can talk to it. And the conversational system has enough state that it can remember what it's talking about. It's not like a question answer, question answering. It doesn't remember. It actually remembers the context of, oh, we're talking about the Oscars, and we're talking about what happened at the Oscars and what do I think? And then it sort of goes and it gives you a thoughtful answer as to what happened and what is possible. In my case, I was playing with one of them a few months ago, and this one I asked the question, what is the device that's in 2001 A Space Odyssey that I am using today? There's something from 1969 that I'm using today that was foreshadowed in the movie. And it comes right back and says, the iPad. Now, that's a question that Google won't answer if you ask it the way I did. So I believe that the biggest positive impact will be that you'll have a system that you can verbally or by writing ask it questions, and it will make you incredibly smarter, that it'll give you the nuance and the understanding in the context, and you can ask it another question, and you can refine your question. Now, if you think about it in the work you do, or that I do, or that a scientist does, or a politician, or an artist, this is enormously transformative. So example after example, these systems are going to build scientific breakthroughs, scalable breakthroughs. Another example was that a group at Deep Mind figured out the folding structure of proteins. And proteins are the way in which biology works and the way they fold determines their effectiveness, what they actually do. And it was thought to be not really computable. And using these techniques in a very complicated way with a whole bunch of protein scientists, they managed to do it, and their their result was replicated in a different mechanism with different AI from something called the Baker Lab and University of Washington. The two together have given us a map of how proteins work, which in my view is worthy of a Nobel Prize. That's how big a discovery that is. All of a sudden, we are unlocking the way biology works and it affects us directly. Those are some positive examples. I think the negative examples let's wait because I'm chock full of negative examples, but I'm interested in how even the positive can disclose a surprisingly negative possibility, or at least it becomes negative if we haven't planned for it ethically, politically, economically. So you imagine the success. You imagine that more and more so what you've just pictured was a future of machine and human cooperation and facilitation, where people just get smarter by being able to have access to these tools, or they get effectively smarter. But you can imagine just in the limit more and more getting seeded to AI, because AI is just better at doing these things. It's better at proving theorems, it's better at designing software. It's better, it's better, it's better. And all of a sudden, the need for human developers at all, or human mathematicians at all, you make the list as long as you want. It seems like some of the highest status jobs cognitively might be among the first to fall, which is to say, I certainly expect at this point to have an AI radiologist, certainly before I have an AI plumber. And there's a lot more above and beyond the radiology side of that comparison that I think is going to fall before the basic manual tasks fall to robots. This is a picture of real success. Right. Because in the end, all we're going to care about is performance. We're not going to care about keeping a a monkey in the loop just for reasons of sentimentality. You know, if you're telling me that my car can drive a thousand times better than I can, which say that, you know, it's going to reduce my risk of getting in a fatal accident, killing myself or killing someone, else by a factor of a thousand. If I just flip on autopilot, well, then not only am I going to flip it on, I'm going to consider anyone who declines to do that to be negligent to the point of criminality. And that's never going to change. Everything is going to be in the position of a current chessmaster who knows that the best player on earth is never going to be a person ever again. Right. Because of AlphaZero. I disagree a little bit and I'll tell you why I think you're correct in about 30 years, but I don't think that argument is true in the short term. Yeah, no, just to be clear, I'm not suggesting any time frame there. I'm just saying ultimately if we continue to make progress, something like this seems bound to happen. Yes, but what I want to say is I defy you to argue with me that making people smarter is a bad thing. Okay? Right. So let's start with the premise of the human assistant. That is, the thing that you're using will make humans smarter. It'll make it deeper, better analysis, better choices. But at least the current technology cannot replace essentially the free will of humans. Sort of wake up in the morning, you have a new idea, you decide something, you say that's a bad idea, so forth and so on. We don't know how to do that yet, and I have some speculation on how that will happen. But in the next decade, we're going to not be solving that problem. We'll be solving a different problem, which is how do we get the existing people doing existing jobs to do them more efficiently? That is smarter, better, faster. One of the when we looked at the funding for this AI program that I've since announced, the funding 125,000,000, a fair chunk of it is going to really hard computer science problems. Some of them include we don't really understand how to explain what they're doing. As I mentioned, they're also brittle when they fail. They can fail catastrophically. Like why did it fail? And no one can explain. There are hardening, there are resistance to attack problems. There are a number of problems of this kind. These are hard computer science problems which I think we will get through. They use a lot of power, the algorithms are expensive, that sort of thing. But we have also focusing around the impact on jobs and employment and economics. We're also focusing on national security. And we're focusing on the question that you're asking, which is what's our identity? What does it mean to be human? Before general intelligence comes, we have to deal with the fact that these systems are not capable of choosing their own outcome, but they can be applied to you as a citizen by somebody else against your own satisfaction. So the negatives before AGI are all of the form misinformation, misleading information, creating dangerous tools, and for example, dangerous viruses. For the same reason that we built a fantastic new antibiotic drug. It looks like you could also imagine a similar evil team of producing an incredible number of bad viruses, things that would hurt people. And you could imagine in that scenario they might be clever enough to be able to hurt a particular race or particular sex or something like that, which would be totally evil and obviously a very bad thing. We don't have a way of discussing that today. So when I look at the positives and negatives right now, I think the positives, as with many technologies, really overwhelm the negatives. But the negatives need to be looked at. And we need to have the conversation right now about let's use social media, which is an easy whipping boy here. I would like so I'm clear what my political position is. I'm a very strong proponent of freedom of speech for humans. I am not in favor of freedom of speech for computers, robots, bots, so forth and so on. I want an option with social media which says, I only want to see things that a human has actually communicated from themselves. I want to know that it wasn't snuck in by some Russian agent. I want proof of providence, and I want to know that it's a human. And if it's a real human who's in fact an idiot or crazy or whatever, I want to be able to hear their voice, and I want to be able to decide. I don't agree with it. What's happening instead is these systems are being boosted, they're being pitched, they're being sold by AI. And I think that's got to be limited in some way. I'm in favor of free speech, but I don't want only some people to have megaphones. And if you talk to politicians and you look at the political structure in the country, this is a completely unintended effect of getting everyone wired. Now, is it a human or is it a computer? Is it a Russian, a Russian compromat play or is it an American? Those things need to get resolved. You cannot run a democracy without some level of trust. Let's take that piece here. And obviously it extends beyond the problem of AI's involvement in it, but the misinformation problem is enormous. What are your thoughts about it? Because I'm just imagining we've been spared, thus far the worst possible case of this. Which is just imagine under conditions of where we had something like perfect, deep fakes, right, that were truly difficult to tell apart from real video, what would the controversy around the 2020 election have looked like? Or the war in Ukraine and our dealings with Putin at this moment. Right. Just imagine a perfect, deep fake of Putin declaring a nuclear first strike on the US. Or whatever. Just imagine, essentially, a writer's room from hell, where you have smart, creative people spending their waking hours figuring out how to produce media that is shattering to every open society and conducive to provoking international conflict that is clearly coming in some form. I guess my first question is, are you hopeful that the moment that arrives, we will have the same level of technology that can spot deep fakes, or is there going to be a lag there of months, years, that are going to be difficult to navigate? We don't know. There are people working really hard on generating defects, and there are people working really hard on detecting deepfix. And one of the general problems with misinformation is we don't have enough training data. The term here is, in order to get an AI system to know something, you have to give it enough examples of good bad, good, bad, and eventually you can say, oh, here's something new, and I know if it's good or bad. And one of the core problems of misinformation is we don't have enough agreement on what is misinformation or what have you. And the thought experiment I would offer is President Putin and Russia has already shut down the Internet and free speech and controls the media and so forth. So let's imagine that he was further, even if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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 samharris or work./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, we're about a week into the tragedy and fiasco of Afghanistan, which is in part the topic of today's podcast. As you'll hear, I'm not entirely sure what I think about our withdrawal. That is, I'm not sure what I think about whether or not it should have happened. I can honestly inhabit both sides of that debate. But how we withdrew the lack of preparation, the lack of foresight, the lack of consultation with our allies like the British, our failure to extract the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped us, the interpreters and their families, whose lives are now in utter jeopardy because of our bungling, our failure to ensure the safe passage of our own citizens. All of this is such a shocking betrayal of our obligations and of our own interests that it just beggars belief. It's almost impossible to imagine a greater indication of American decline and a greater gift to our enemies, to the jihadists globally, who must feel absolutely triumphant at this moment, and to China and Russia, who must now know to a moral certainty that they can always call our bluff because we simply are no longer a competent superpower. We have been visibly spooked by our own shadow here. So if China invades Taiwan this year or next or the year after, I think it's safe to say that our frantic withdrawal from Afghanistan will surely be one of the reasons why they felt they could. Again, I'm not taking a position on the question of whether we should have left Afghanistan now or last year or ten years ago. I can see both sides of that debate. But the way we left is absolutely astonishing, and it will harm us as a nation, guaranteed. Who will trust our assurance of protection now, whether it's an ally like Taiwan or any faction within a country that we're trying to support in some future humanitarian crisis? If you don't think that matters, if you don't think we need our friends to trust us and our enemies to fear us, I don't know what planet you think you're living on. Perhaps you think we can just retreat from geopolitics altogether and simply ignore the rest of the world. We should just repair our bridges and get the lead out of our own water pipes. Right, of course we should do those things immediately. But a world without America as a functioning superpower is a very scary world, and not just for Americans. A world where our NATO allies can't trust us to honor our obligations is a world where the risk of major wars has increased, not decreased. So what has happened in this last week is like the wheels have completely come off. As a country, we have to get a handle on this. And, again, I think this has to be recognized and responded to. Whatever you think about the wisdom of getting out of Afghanistan anyway, those of you who might want to support our friends in Afghanistan who desperately need refugee status, I would recommend a donation to the International Rescue Committee. I had David Miliband on the podcast previously, I think about a year ago, who runs it. And the Waking Up Foundation will be donating $100,000 to the IRC this week, which of course, is made possible by those of you who subscribe either to the Making Sense podcast or to the Waking Up app, or both. So thank you for that. And if any of you get inspired to ride along with us in this donation this week to the IRC, I would certainly welcome it. And the website for the International Rescue Committee is rescue. And now for today's podcast, where we get into many of the details here today, I'm speaking with Peter Bergen. Peter is the author of several books, most recently The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, which we discuss in the second half of the podcast. He is a vice president at New America and a professor at Arizona State University and also a national security analyst for CNN. Peter has testified before Congress and held positions at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and has been covering jihadist, terrorism, and Al Qaeda in particular since the 90s. So in this podcast, we discuss the US. Exit from Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban. And then we get into his new book. We cover the neo isolationist consensus that seems to be forming on the far right and far left politically, the legitimacy of our initial involvement in Afghanistan. Whatever you think of the ultimate outcome. We discuss our ethical obligations to our Afghan allies. Biden's disastrous messaging, the weakness of the Afghan army and what happened there. The advantages that the Taliban had the implications for global jihadism the relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, how Osama bin Laden came to lead al Qaeda, bin Laden's religious convictions, our failure to capture him at Tora Bora, the distraction of the war in Iraq, the myth that the CIA funded Al Qaeda. Bin Laden's relationship with his wives, his years of hiding in Pakistan, his death at the hands of U. S. Special Forces and other topics. Anyway, the conversation is all too timely, unfortunately. And whether or not Afghanistan stays in our news cycle, I think the reality of what's happening there is going to have implications for a long time to come. And this conversation is certainly a good starting point for thinking about why that's the case. And now I bring you Peter Bergen. I am here with Peter Bergen. Peter, thanks for joining me. Sam, thank you for having me on. So you've written a wonderful book which we will get into the Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. Actually, it's a great audio book, too. That's how I consumed most of it this week. That's good to hear. Yeah. You didn't read it, but you I didn't, actually, strangely, reading these books, I don't know if you've done your own books, but it's a very exhausting process, which is kind of counterintuitive. Oh, yeah. No, it's a total ordeal for me to read books. It's genuinely heroin. I've actually had to rewrite sentences on the fly because I literally could not get through them, even after 20 takes. And I just they were not written to be read by me. It was just an insane circus olay routine that I could not perform. So, yes, we'll get to the book, which is which is all too germane to the current topic, that's absorbing everyone's interests now and concern, which is the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. But I guess before we jump in, maybe summarize your background, how is it that you come to know about these issues and what have you focused on these many years? I was living in Manhattan in the in the early 90s, before I moved to DC. And in late February 1993, a group of men drove a van into the World Trade Center parking garage and blew it up, intending to bring down both towers. And there were these men had one thing in common. They'd all supported the Afghan war effort against the Soviets or actually even fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. And so I went to my bosses at CNN and said, this seems interesting. There seems to be some sort of phenomenon here. I traveled to Afghanistan. The first time I ever went there, it was in the middle of a very brutal civil war. Much more intense than what we see now with Peter Arnett, who was then almost certainly the world's most famous correspondent. Because it was relatively shortly after the end of the Gulf War and we and another colleague sort of spent many weeks in Afghanistan trying to document this. And it was a very tricky situation because it was A, very nasty civil war and B, no communications to speak of. We took a satellite phone in. That was the size. It was £200. That was the state of the art satellite phone. And today, of course, you can just use a cell phone. So it was kind of a hard place to function. But after that, I heard about bin Laden in 1996 and again went to my bosses at CNN. They, of course, had no idea who he was. And I said to them, you know, perhaps he was responsible for this, you know, for this phenomenon. And he really wasn't involved in in the the Trade Center bombing in 93, except in the most peripheral of ways. But of course, he was responsible for this both organization and movement. That kind of was an outgrowth of the 93 Trade Center bombing. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll go, you know, we'll go back into the history a bit and, and track through your book. But what are your thoughts now upon seeing over the last week what has happened in Afghanistan? Well, unfortunately, it was both predicted and predictable, not only by myself, but by others, because you didn't need to be sort of Klaus Swiss to recognize that if we absented ourselves entirely with the United States, then all our NATO allies would leave. There were, by the way, 2500 American troops, but there were 7000 NATO allied troops and 16,000 contractors, all of which have left or are in the process of leaving. And this caused a complete collapse of morale amongst the Afghan military and Afghan government. And there's a kind of line of argument that the Afghan army was weak. And certainly there is some truth to an incompetently led organization. But 66,000 Afghan soldiers and Afghan policemen died fighting the Taliban, which is about 30 times larger than the number of American fatalities. So it's not that there wasn't a will to fight, it's just the will to fight evaporated when there was no longer medevac, close air support, American advisers, et cetera. Yeah, I want to get into the seeming conundrum of what happened with the Afghan army. But before we do what I'm troubled by in the last few days in witnessing the reaction to this, there seems to be a consensus forming domestically in America. Maybe it's worldwide, but there's a kind of neo isolationist consensus on the far left and the far right. And maybe far is in scare quotes. I don't know how far in either direction you have to go before you run into this, but it seems that both sides of the political spectrum have large cohorts that agree that not only did we have to leave Afghanistan, but we had no business being there in the first place. Right. And the whole project was illegitimate. And, you know, on the right, I think you, you tend to hear people denigrating the Afghans and, and thinking that they just, you know, they're they're not ready for democracy. They they want the Taliban, they're barbarians. This was a fool's errand to try to bring them into the 21st century. And above all, at this moment, let's keep their damn refugees out of our country. So there's that attitude on the far right. On the left, people tend to denigrate America and Western civilization. And so the idea that we could pretend to want to spread our values to the rest of the world when we're the greatest criminals and terrorists in history, it's surreal. On the left, you have people who list their preferred pronouns in their Twitter BIOS and who would want to see their neighbors and coworkers destroyed for telling off color jokes, but who will simultaneously claim that we shouldn't judge the treatment of women under the Taliban, right? Who are we to pretend to care about these women? And who are we to even judge this ancient culture for its own norms? But both sides seem to agree that we have no business being the world's cop and that nation building never works. You have these phrases, these catchphrases that do immense work here where Afghanistan was the graveyard of empires, right? So which of course, this was ill conceived and we were committed to a forever war here on both sides. People seem to imagine that the reason why we were in there was to enrich ourselves in some way. We were stealing natural resources. And I'm sure both sides in the end, will find some way to put the Jews to the back of all of this. We're living in an information space that is contaminated by conspiracy theory and a complete loss of trust in the media, in institutions, in the possibility of benign American power. And so before we get into the details of the rest, I'm just wondering how you see this consensus that we had to rip the Band Aid off and we're better for it. We just get the hell out. This was going to fail. Precisely. In some ways, Biden has almost echoed this like it was always going to be this bad. There was no way to exit, there was going to be any better. Just rip the Band Aid off. Right? Yeah. And of course, I have a whole host of reactions to that. I mean, we've heard from the White House, in a sense through White House reporters, that, you know, the fact that it all collapsed so quickly is evidence of Biden's brilliant, brilliant decision, which kind of a sort of strange way of defending a not very smart decision. There are many things to be said. For a start, there are 1.3 million active duty Americans, 2 million when you throw in the reserves, and 2500 is not a large I'm not a mathematician, but it's a really, really small percentage of the force that we have. And that was what sufficient to kind of prevent the collapse that followed. And I think that this was completely unnecessary. There's kind of two arguments that have been heard. One is that this was a great idea, but the execution was terrible. Well, no one's denying the execution was a total fiasco, but I'm unconvinced it was the right policy decision. One of the there's a great Washington DC tendency, which we're seeing right now, which is when you make a policy fiasco, you blame it on the intelligence. You say, the intelligence didn't really tell us that this would collapse so quickly or whatever, but I think this was very fast moving. And it was predictable that if we just pull the plug or rip the bandage off, as you put it, that there was going to be real problems. And here they are. And there's kind of back to the future element to this, because we're approaching the 20th anniversary of 911. The Taliban are in control of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, according to the United Nations, in a report released in June, is closely aligned with the Taliban. Al Qaeda is present in 19 of the 34 Afghan provinces, again according to the UN. And the resistance to the Taliban has been led by Aquaman Bashar Masood's son in the Pangir Valley, which is exactly what was two days before 911. Akma Sharma, sued, was assassinated by al Qaeda. So we'll see how this what does it mean for American national security is kind of another question. We're much more well defended than we were in the past than, say, on 911. But there are going to be plenty of people sort of excited about this who either will try to go and get training in Afghanistan or simply radicalize at home in front of their computer and do something in the name of the Taliban or al Qaeda, as we saw during the ISIS caliphate. Yeah, just to focus on the legitimacy of the initial project for another moment, it seems to me one really has to make distinctions, fairly granular distinctions, across every point in this timeline. So, for instance, one could certainly admit that going into Afghanistan was perfectly legitimate. We we went in for the right reasons. We had to go in, but then also concede that the project failed there for a variety of reasons that we need to understand and that weren't for ordained. Right. Or you could further argue that despite how difficult our 20 years there were, the project itself was still salvageable. Right. That, you know, that the serious combat for our troops had ended somewhere around 2014, and that our continued presence there would have been far preferable to what has now happened. I mean, we've been in South Korea for 70 years or so, and we've been in Western Europe longer than that, and no one's talking about a forever war with respect to those places. So it's clear that we can maintain troops in places for a sane purpose, whether it's humanitarian or geopolitical or both, without feeling that we have become the world's masochists or an evil empire. So it's just wherever you fall in your optimism or pessimism with respect to the possibilities in Afghanistan, it's still possible to argue that maintaining our presence there, as mediocre as the result seemed, is far better than what has just happened and what is likely to be coming. I mean, I'm in violent agreement with that. The enemy of the perfect isn't sort of the reasonably okay, and what we had before was sort of reasonably okay. And this is obviously a catastrophic debacle that has sort of taken place, the 2500 troops or the 3500 troops. And part of this also was just about, I think, our messaging. And we've been saying since that we're planning to leave Afghanistan since December 1, 2009, when President Obama went to West Point to announce a surge, and at the same time a surge of troops, and at the same time announced their withdrawal date. And of course, Trump repeatedly said, we're leaving, and Biden has completed the withdrawal. Of course he can change his mind. I mean, President Obama changed his mind in Iraq after the rise of ISIS, and sent in thousands of troops in the end to train the Iraqi counterterrorism service, which turned out to be a very effective special Forces unit, which pretty much destroyed much of Al Qaeda in Iraq with American air support. So this is not over. Biden can change his mind. Right now, we're in the phase of trying to get Americans out, and our allies, even if you disagree with the position I just sketched out, which the truth is, I'm not even sure what my view is here. I could easily be persuaded that we should have gotten out more or less now, right? But what seems patently obvious and has been denied by every one of Biden's public utterances I've heard thus far, is that we could have, and should have massively prepared to extract not only the ten or 15,000 American citizens who are rumored to still be there. But all of our allies, all of the people who put their lives on the line to collaborate with us, who are translators and people who are now very much at risk of being killed by the Taliban, we had an ethical obligation, we have an ethical obligation to get them out. And the idea that we couldn't have done it in a truly orderly way with sufficient force on the ground, that just seems insane in his messaging about this. I don't know why Biden would even be tempted to try to put a brave face on how this has unraveled here and claim that there was no better way to do this. We can't even guarantee the safe passage of our own citizens to the airport. I mean, I completely agree with that. I don't think there's a single person listening to this who doesn't think that this has been extremely poorly handled. The harder question where people do disagree is like, was it the right thing to do? Let's do the thought experiment where this was perfectly planned and a year went into the planning and everybody needed to get out, got out. I think you would have still ended up with the, with the Taliban in control. And some people may be fine with that and some people may not be. I mean, I fall into the category of I spent a fair amount of time in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, and I have a healthy skepticism for their claims of amnesty for people that were fighting them. I have a healthy skepticism for their claims about girls being educated or women having jobs. The crucial modifier in their statements, Sam, is whenever they say something like, of course we'll have education for women, and then they add in the context of Sharia law. Yeah, which is a pretty large caveat because their interpretation of Sharia law differs pretty markedly from most Muslims. And the same thing they've actually said about the independent media. Yeah, we're, we're going to have an independent media, but they're going to have to kind of do it in the context of Sharia law. So these are huge caveats, and these are coming from the sort of Doha Taliban or political Taliban. The people in the field, they're going to sort of make their own judgments about who they want to kill or attack, because the Taliban itself is not a monolithic entity. So I have a question for you, which is if you were to score this as sort of an American failure, is this Hurricane Katrina for Bush? Is this the Iraq War decision? It's hard for me to think of an analog of something that was so poorly handled and so unnecessarily screwed up. Even with the Iraq War decision, it didn't really become clear until several months in what a fiasco it was and all the false pretenses that it was kind of predicated upon here. The disaster is immediately obvious from day one, and I doubt the pictures are going to get better over time. Yeah, I mean, there's something especially grotesque about this because the images and I'm sure we're going to see worse in coming weeks, but the images we have are every bit as bad as the Fall of Saigon. And Biden is becoming a gaff machine with respect to this topic. I mean, the images have, have been supplied precisely in the form he said they, they would never appear. Right. He said, we will not see fall of Saigonlike images, and what we have seen is worse, but certainly reminiscent of those older images. There's just a pervasive sense that there are no grown ups left to help run the world. If Biden's presidency meant anything as a real turning of the page from Trump's, it was in a renewed commitment to competence. Right. And this is so incompetent. I don't think we should be under any illusions that it would be better if Trump were in charge. If Trump were president, I'm sure he would have done something just like this. I mean, he's the one who committed us to getting out in May. He signed this, I believe it's referred to as the capitulation agreement with the Taliban. So he's, he started us on this path. But if he were president, you could just imagine what his messaging would be. He would say things like, he's totally capable of saying things like, I love the Taliban. They only say nice things about me. It could just be a complete repudiation of any sort of moral integrity we once had. But effectively, that's happening anyway in how little thought we've given to the wellbeing of the people who helped us. And yeah, I mean, the idea that a generation of women and girls is now going to be pitched back into the Dark Ages is something that no one should be comfortable with. And it's certainly an argument it's all one needs for an argument to have continued our presence there for another generation at whatever sacrifice it seemed at this point, a truly minimal sacrifice just to ensure that women and girls are not pointlessly miserated for the rest of their lives under the Taliban. And I like the I like the verb emiserated, because also that's going to be true for much of the rest of the population. I mean, miseration that I witnessed when I was in Taliban controlled Afghanistan was, you know, that the country had already gone through the Soviet occupation and the civil war. The economy was what remained of the economy completely disappeared under the Taliban. You know, I spoke to doctors who were earning in Kabul who were earning $6 a month. So what is the Taliban project? The Taliban project is to make society pure, and then when society is pure, utopia will be achieved. Unfortunately, that doesn't plan for things like keeping the electricity on or the water or the Taliban is not really interested in sort of conventional governance. They are interested in judicial decision making, and they're interested in kind of kind of how to set up an educational system that conforms with their views. But as for anything else they don't have, maybe the new Taliban will have more competent people, but they certainly didn't when they were in power, and it's really not their priority. I mean, I haven't seen a Taliban plan for kind of what their economic plan is or, like, it's almost an oxymoron. So, unfortunately, we can expect them to, as we've already seen, attack or try and attack anybody that they consider to be an enemy, which is anybody who collaborated with the United States or our NATO allies. And the number is, you know, I it's hard to put a number on how many people worked with different we had 49 countries in there at one point who were going back to this kind of legitimacy. Actually, Sam, I mean, this is probably one of the more legitimate wars in history, because not only did the Congress vote overwhelmingly with only one descending vote, which was Barbara Lee of California, then NATO invoked Article Five for the first time and only time in its history, the collective right to self defense. And rather crucially, the United Nations passed a resolution a few days after 911 saying that the United States could respond by any any means necessary, which is UN speak for, you know, basically, you can go to war in a legitimate sense. So, yeah, I can't think of of a war. Certainly the United States is conducted where there was that level of international and unanimity on the legitimacy of the war. I'm surprised by the figure that you gave earlier of the troop levels of our allies that were still there. That opens the question, why is it all on us? Or maybe I'm just I have a myopic view of our own national disgrace here. And I think the UK is people in the UK are expressing the same opinion of themselves. But why was our pulling out synonymous with the unraveling of everything? That is a very good question. But I mean, the 7000 American allied troops, NATO troops that were there, a lot of them were doing advice and assist missions. It was non combat roles in Germany. The German political dispensation wouldn't allow Germans to be involved in combat, and so they were mostly in supporting roles of one kind of or another, which is important. We're gathering intelligence, but we provide the security umbrella under which all this took place. That's in terms of our satellite imagery and our drones and the levels of intelligence we have, and the fact that we have special operations and forces that can go out on counterterrorism missions. I think when that was pulled out, I mean, a leading indicator, I don't know if you remember this sound, but the Australians said they were going to close their embassy. It feels like it was several weeks ago that they said that. I mean, they saw the writing on the wall and the Australians actually fought rather bravely in Afghanistan. So it just created this sort of crisis of confidence. And war is always about a contest of wills. And if the will starts sort of receding, it's a very quick it's the Hemingway line about how did you go bankrupt? Well, first gradually, and then suddenly, this is what happened. Well, so on the point of bankruptcy, what do we make of the collapse of the Afghan government and the Afghan police and armed forces? It seems like the writing has been on the wall there for a very long time in terms of our knowing about the corruption of the government. Actually, I was unaware of how deep this ran, but this week someone surfaced, a documentary that was from 2012. Perhaps you saw it. The journalist Ben Anderson for Vice, along with Eddie Moretti, produced this documentary titled this Is What Winning Looks Like, I think. Came out in 2012. And he was just ben Anderson was embedded with US forces who were taking a purely supportive role for Afghan forces at that point. Just letting them execute all their missions and the lack of real trust and real morale between the Americans and the Afghans was pretty startling. And they're just these ghastly episodes where they'd find an Afghan police commander who's raping boys and they want to, you know yeah, the Americans want to do something about this. And what they. Come up against is that this is basically a social norm that, you know, it's just it's ubiquitous. It's like I think one of the Afghans said, you know, good luck finding a police commander who's not raping boys. This is what we do. And they were raped as boys, and now they're entitled to rape boys. And so there was such a disjunction between any kind of idealism for what could be built through this partnership and what was actually the actual truth on the ground. And there were so many signs that this would unravel. We're putting people in totally untenable situations when we're going into a village along with Afghan forces and demanding that people support the government. And it was perfectly obvious that the villagers, they had to hedge their bets because they know the Taliban could be in there in the next the next week making the opposite demands, and they have to more or less agree to be loyal to whoever is standing in front of them holding a gun. I don't know. Did you ever see that film? I didn't, but I experienced it myself, and I was in Helmland with the Marines in 2009. There was a Marine lieutenant colonel. He was asked by a farmer, you know, how long do you plan to be around? And the Marine lieutenant colonel wasn't going to lie to him. He said, I can only promise you I'll be here for nine months. And the farmer clearly, what the farmer meant was exactly what you've pointed out, which is like people switched surrender to the Taliban, not because they suddenly became enthusiasts for the Taliban's view of utopia, but because they wanted to keep their heads on their bodies. And, you know, the war in Afghanistan began began in 1978. It it began even before the Soviets invaded. So it's been going on for 43 years, and Afghans want to survive, and they've had multiple switches. In 92, the Kabul fell. The communists were defeated, and Kabul fell to the sort of the warlords. In 96, kabul fell to the Taliban. In 2001, Kabul fell to the Americans, and now it's fallen back to the Taliban. So I think there's a it's not that Afghans are sort of inherently conniving. They've had a long experience of needing to survive in a war that's gone on for almost half a century. And so what you describe in that documentary is exactly right, which is going back to the question of corruption and the police and the army. I went out on patrol with Afghan police in the sort of 2003, 2004 time period, and they were smoking the best quality grass you can get in the world, and that was about all they were doing. So, you know, the police were very poorly paid, no real morale. The army is slightly better. But when President Biden talks about the 300,000 man army, that figure is probably half that, because so many people were deserted, so many ghost soldiers. So, you know, it that was it hasn't really been that wasn't really much of a success. The Afghan Special forces are quite robust, and and they were they've been fighting well, and the Afghan Air force has some competence. But clearly the Afghan army, if you haven't been fed or paid for many, many months, it's not like you're going to have a tremendous loyalty to the central government. Yeah. And there's also just this truly asymmetrical advantage with respect to morale and commitment. When you picture the psychology on the Taliban side, you have one side that is literally fighting for paradise or their conception of paradise, and the other is fighting for money, praying, some pragmatic sense of the game, theory of the moment. And all of that is, however you can stitch it together, is far more fragile unless there are people, a sufficient number of people on the government and army side who are. This speaks to some possibility that there's more sympathy with the Taliban worldview than we might want to emphasize in this context. I could imagine if most Afghans are as horrified by the Taliban as I am, then the explanation that they haven't been paid doesn't cut it. Right. I mean, this is a life and death struggle against a totalitarian theocracy. You'd expect the two sides would really fight it out. But I have to expect that while they may not be totally sympathetic with the conception of sharia that the Taliban is going to demand of them, it's not as obscenely divergent from what most people think should be normative as it would be in our context. I would sort of caveat that pretty heavily in the following sense. So the Taliban is an overwhelmingly Pashtune movement. The Pashtunes are 40%, roughly, of the population. They are most almost entirely from the south and the east. And so the norms that they have are the norms of rural passions. These are not the norms of Tajik's hazaras or Uzbek's or people who live in the cities. They're not like right. Yeah. I'm not saying that people in Kabul are, like, sort of taking tons of drugs and going to discos, and there's obviously gender segregation, but it's a much lower order. I agree with you in the sense that just to ask you, I don't know a ton about him, but someone like Akman Shama sued right. Who you mentioned earlier. I can't imagine he was as liberal a figure as we would want him to be in opposition to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. That is true. Look, I mean, Akhma Sharma sued, who I met in 93, and was kind of an astonishing human being, probably the most impressive person I've ever met. He was an Islamist, but he was also an Islamist with a kind of orientation to the west. I mean, he's I think he went to a French Lisa in Kabul. He, you know, he was perfectly happy dealing with Westerners and so it's it is a matter of degree, as you point out. Yeah, but and the other thing also just a sort of related point on the Taliban. And the Taliban also pays people, and they're sitting on a, you know, multi billion dollar poppy opium enterprise. And so I think for a lot of the foot soldiers of the Taliban, they may not completely subscribe to Taliban ideology. They may not really care about it completely. They are getting paid pretty steadily. And just like ISIS was able to pay people, there's kind of a distinction between a terrorist group and an insurgent group. Obviously, there are kind of military differences, but terrorist groups tend to be volunteers, and often from the upper middle class or middle class. An insurgent group usually has people on the payroll. When you have 30,000 men in the field or 60,000 or 75,000, as in the case now, the Taliban, that's a pretty big payroll to meet. The Taliban was pending. People There are limited jobs for young men in Afghanistan, and so there is some ideological component to this, but there's also for some people, this is just a job. And it's a job where you're actually getting paid. Yeah. And again, you're back in what appears to be what clearly is the stronger horse. Right. It's just purely pragmatic at that point as well. Yeah. So how do you view this? Now, let's think about the implications of this for jihadism globally. Do we think that a resurgent Taliban, something like their version of a caliphate in Afghanistan, will have a similar Galvanizing effect that the Islamic State had worldwide? And is this just the pendulum swing back into global jihadism, claiming more and more of our of our bandwidth? Geopolitically and Journalistically I think the short answer is yes. I mean, why would it be any different? I mean, here here the Taliban in their own minds defeated first the Soviets, because a lot of them came out of the anti Soviet jihad and now the Americans. That's a pretty big deal. And they're going to declare not a caliphate, but an emirate. The distinctions between the two are less important than the similarities. Right. And the commander of the faithful is how the Taliban refers to their leader, which is a claim that not only do I lead the Taliban, but I'm in charge of all Muslims everywhere, which is the same claim that Abu Bakr al Baghdadi made when he declared ISIS. So one of the big differences, I think, is that ISIS was like pathologically sectarian. The Taliban certainly have engaged in anti Shia, anti Hazara massacres. They may not be the defining core of their movement, which for the ISIS, clearly that was the case. But I think you're going to see foreign fighters pouring in from South Asia and parts of Europe to join this incredibly successful enterprise. And you'll see a few Americans who may try and travel there. You'll certainly see people radicalizing in front of their computers because, you know, they they believe that this great jihadist victory has happened, and they self identify. And we saw that with ISIS. The problem, of course, in in the United States was people kind of self radicalizing because of the ISIS geographical caliphate. And it was very exciting. Once that caliphate geographically disappeared, the number of people who got excited about it was much, much smaller because no one wants to join the losing side. So right now, the taliban of the winning side, al qaeda, is kind of on the front lines with them, and not only Al qaeda, but other jihadi groups. So I think we've seen this movie before. We kind of know how it begins, and we also know how it ends. It doesn't end usually very well for the groups concerned because ultimately a coalition of nations and other groups like Napoleon in 1813, which is like, if you make a world of enemies, it's going to lead to your own defeat. And these groups tend to do that. They tend to kind of create a lot of antibodies, whether it's domestically or internationally. Now we're kind of backing into the contents of your book. We know through your reporting that there's been a very cozy relationship between the taliban and al qaeda. All the while, there was really while there was some discomfort at various stages of osama bin laden's reign, where he was seeking publicity in ways that malomar and others found inconvenient, there was never really a significant breach between them, and they've been mutually supportive until the present. But I'm wondering, what do we know about the fact that there was not only not real collaboration, but actually overt hostility between the taliban and ISIS or the islamic state? Yeah, I mean, they've certainly been fighting each other. Is that ideological, or is it just not wanting to share the power? As far as I can tell, it's mostly taliban groups that have slapped on the ISIS kind of patch, and that makes them bigger and badder. And I don't think it's like the narcissism of minor differences, which is freud's pretty observation about most human activity. You do think it is, or you don't think it is? No, I don't think there's some big ideological split. Certainly ISIS is more likely to attack shia, whether in afghanistan or anywhere else, but I think it's more just that certain taliban groups wanted to be the biggest, baddest person on the block and slapped on the ISIS patch, and it was more about local grievances or local personalities. I don't think there was the taliban, of course, had engaged in negotiations with the United States, which ISIS clearly hasn't done, but I see it as more the narcissism of minor differences rather than some big ideological split. Right. Obviously, ISIS and al qaeda have split in a kind of perhaps a little more ideological manner because al qaeda has tended to want to avoid attacking shia except Al Qaeda in Iraq, which of course, was sort of the progenitor of ISIS, right? Okay, so let's get into the history here and the fascinating case study of Osama bin Laden. We actually know a lot about him now, as you report, given how many documents were liberated from, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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 cast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I recently ran an opinion poll online asking people how often they think seriously about death, about its inevitability, about their priorities in light of it, etc. Here. And I gave the choices many times a day, perhaps once a day. I can go days without thinking about it, I can go weeks without thinking about it. And I'm not sure what results I was expecting, but the distribution did surprise me. Obviously, this isn't a scientific sample it was mostly a sample of the kind of people who follow me on Twitter, though I think the poll did spread somewhat beyond my audience. I got over 40,000 responses anyway. The largest cohort were those who don't think about death very often. 32% said they can go weeks without doing so, 27% can go days without it, 28% think about death perhaps once a day, and only 13% were people like me who think about it many times each day. So judging from these results, I probably think about death more in the average day than most people think about it in many months or even a year. I generally don't think about it in a way that I would consider morbid. My thoughts tend to be more in line with the Memento Mori reflections that are widely recommended by Buddhists and Stoics, and which you could find echoed in several places in Waking Up, reflecting on the preciousness of life, on the nonrenewable character of time, on the reality that you simply don't know how much time you have. But you definitely have one less day, today and every day. Thoughts of this kind need not make a person depressed, though perhaps they make some people depressed. Rather, they can and should inspire us to wisdom and compassion. Do that most important thing. Now. Express your love now relinquish those hangups. Now, bury the hatchet. Now, recognize the nature of mind. Now, live fully now, for one day you will die. But it does seem that many people don't reflect in this way and do their best to avoid thinking about death altogether. And even those of us who think about it a lot still suffer from various forms of death. Denial, for instance. Even though the reality and inevitability of death seem very well established in my mind, more often than not, I'm still shocked to learn that any specific person has died unless that person was in his or her 90s. Any specific death still seems somehow anomalous to me. My first question is some incredulous version of what happened. So I do detect in myself some form of death denial. Even though I think about the reality of death a lot and the reality of it is everywhere, I notice more and more that many of the people I admire, people who I read or listen to with pleasure actors who I enjoy watching in films. People whose thoughts and personalities I can summon in an instant by picking up a book or typing their names into YouTube. I notice more and more that many of these people are dead, and some died at an age that I've already surpassed. And I'm also occasionally aware that I'm likely going to occupy this role for other people. I don't think it's totally grandiose of me to imagine that some people will listen to my voice or read my books after I'm dead. Now, I'm 54 at the time I'm recording this. How long will I live? Obviously, I have no idea. But what will it be like for someone who cares about the life I've lived and who finds some value in my view of the world? What will it be like for you to listen to this audio after I'm gone? To know that I lived as fully as you do now, but to know that I no longer do well, I know exactly what that's like. I have that experience more or less every day. There's something very strange about this time capsule effect, this one way communication with the past. It's amazing that we have media that allows us to do this, to have this shock of recognition. You can summon Carl Sagan or Marlon Brando from beyond the grave and fully recognize that they were once as alive as you are now. And we know the precise day that they died. And we also know that the world went on without them. When we think about death, there are different facets of it that we can focus on. We can think about our own deaths, or we can think about the deaths of other people, in particular those closest to us. And these are very different problems. When I think about the deaths of the people I love, the focus is much more on my own bereavement than it is on the fact of death itself. Even though it's true that when I die I will lose everyone, I won't be alive to experience that loss. So bereavement doesn't really enter into it. It seems to me that the pure reflection on death itself is really best focused on our own case. However, even here, it's possible to get distracted by other things. For instance, we can worry about the process of dying, whether it's going to be sudden or after a long illness. Will it be painful, or in some other way, chaotic, or will we go peacefully in our sleep. Thinking about the process of dying is really thinking about the specific experiences one will have at the end of one's life. To think about death itself is to think about what happens after that or about what doesn't happen after that. So it's not the dying, it's the being dead part that interests me here. So today I'm going to say a few things about what it might mean to be dead. And I want to explore certain paradoxes that seem to surround this phenomenon. So we can leave the process of dying aside. It's going to be whatever it will be. And whatever it is, it will be a finite experience. Which is to say that however painful it might be, in the case of any one of us, there will come a time when it ceases to be painful. Even if one suffers a long illness and a blizzard of medical interventions, there will be a moment when all of that ends. So dying will be like anything else in life. It will be temporary. The part that seems like it might not be temporary is the condition of being dead. Now, what we think about death, in particular about what happens to each of us after our bodies die, depends on what we believe about. Two fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind the nature of consciousness and the nature of identity. The question about the status of consciousness in the natural world is often referred to as the mind body problem. What is the relationship between mind and matter? Where does consciousness come from? Does it arise on the basis of information processing in the brain? Or is it a more fundamental constituent of matter? Or is matter itself a mere appearance in consciousness which would then be the true base layer of reality? There are rival metaphysical views here, specifically physicalism panpsychism and idealism and how everyone resolves the mind body problem. There remains the problem of personal identity. For instance, in what sense am I the same person or self or consciousness that I was yesterday? What could be the basis of any claim to identity? Is it just a matter of psychological continuity through time? What's the significance of such continuity when we think about replacing parts of ourselves, even parts of our brains or strangers? Still, when we think about the prospect of copying our minds onto some other substrate, what would it mean to create minds that have perfect copies of our memories and desires, perhaps better copies than we maintain normally while living? What would any of this suggest about the nature of personal identity? Now, I've discussed many of these riddles elsewhere without giving anything like final answers to them. But here I want to focus on the question of death as viewed from the inside, from the point of view of the experience of any person who has died. And of course, this will be each of us ultimately, unless we get to a time where we're actually duplicating ourselves or otherwise perfectly resisting biological decay. Each of us will one day be counted among the dead by those who outlive us. But before we get started here this one peculiar intuition often held by religious people that I think we should dispense with at the outset. And it's the intuition that if death really is the end of us, if it's synonymous with the end of experience, well, then that finality robs life of any conceivable purpose or meaning or significance. The idea seems to be that the only way for love or knowledge or beauty or happiness to matter is for these states of mind and states of the world to last forever. It's eternity or nothing. This is a surprisingly common point of view, as I said, especially among the religious. But if you think about it, it is a strange idea. And it's also strange that no one seems to apply it to specific experiences. I never hear someone say that if a play or a dance or a piece of music or a conversation or a hug or a meal or a sunset or anything else doesn't last forever, well, then it was pointless. Rather, I think one could easily argue it's the transgency of everything that magnifies the beauty of everything. I would also point out that the decisions we make while alive, the culture we create, the ideas we invent and spread all of this directly affects the minds of the people who will outlive us. And the effect we have on these people could well make the difference between humanity petering out over the course of the next century or spreading itself through the galaxy for millions or even billions of years. Just take a moment to contemplate the difference between these two futures. In the first, humanity has no future because we fail to mitigate some specific existential risks. And in the other, our future is truly open ended. We achieve a kind of escape velocity with respect to our survival. Now, of course, there are intermediate places on this landscape. If we don't play our cards quite right, we might persist for a very long time under conditions that are not only not desirable but may be quite terrible based on our failure to cooperate intelligently generation after generation. But how each of us lives now will help determine our trajectory here. So what we think and say now matters even if we're not around to experience the consequences. So I won't go into it further here, but I just wanted to indicate that I don't think the finality of death in the case of each individual says much, if anything, about that individual's life. And it certainly says nothing about the meaning of life itself. But there is also something paradoxical about the very idea of death as a condition in which every individual life and mind terminates. And my purpose now is to explore that paradox. The philosopher Tom Clark has a wonderful essay which you can read on his website, Naturalism.org, and the essay is titled Death, Nothingness and Subjectivity, and I want to explore his argument here in some detail. Of course, other philosophers and scientists have said many things on this point. For instance, we have the famous quotation from Epicurus as we encounter him in Lucretius's poem on the Nature of Things. Quote Death is nothing to us when we exist, death is not. And when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death, and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. End quote. So this idea of nothingness, of oblivion, of a dark abyss, of a kind of positive absence, of an endless deprivation of experience is misleading. If we're simply talking about the end of experience, you didn't experience your absence before you were born, and if death is truly the end of experience, you won't experience your absence after you die. So this reification of death as eternal nothingness is fundamentally misleading. And Clark starts his essay there. The philosopher Vitkinstein made a similar point in disparaging Freud's notion of the unconscious. He said, quote, Imagine a language in which, instead of saying, I found nobody in the room, one said, I found Mr. Nobody in the room. Imagine the philosophical problems that would arise out of such a convention, end quote. That's from the Blue Book. The point is, nothingness isn't something, and therefore it can't be a permanent condition of any being or mind. The second point that Clark explores is the subjective continuity of consciousness. From the point of view of consciousness, there can be no experience of before or after with respect to birth and death, so there is something almost eternal about it from its own point of view. Of course, we think we experience interruptions of consciousness while alive, in sleep or under anesthesia, but that's not quite true. It's true that we experience changes in the character of our experience, that is, in the contents of consciousness. It feels like something to wake up groggy from sleep, say. But from the point of view of consciousness, we just experience one moment after the next, even if some moments indicate that there were periods of time that we can't account for or did not experience at all. From the point of view of consciousness, there is justice and charity. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Mark Olilla. Mark is a professor at Columbia University and a prize winning essayist for the New York Review of Books and many other publications. His books include The Shipwrecked Mind, The Stillborn God, The Reckless Mind, and his latest book, which is what we discuss is The Once and Future Liberal. And Mark and I talk about essentially the nature and history of liberalism in the United States and how identity politics has changed it. We talk about the ways in which identity politics may or may not be legitimate. We talk about the role of class in American society, wealth inequality, and we disagree about a few things, we agree about others. But it was a very enjoyable conversation and one that many of us who care about the future of politics have been having more and more. So now, without further delay, I bring you Mark Lilla. I am here with Mark Lilla. Mark, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to be here. So we have a mutual friend in, Andrew Sullivan. I think that was our connection. And Andrew is someone who I have sparred with to our mutual amusement and benefit. And he's a great example for me of someone who you can disagree, stridently with and still become friends. This is really what I aspired have all disagreements become, but it doesn't usually work out that way. You have the two of you have been going at each other for quite a while, haven't you? Yeah. So you've written this wonderful new book and it's wonderful also in part because it's so short. It really is one of these books that you can pick up and finish no matter what your bandwidth problems are. And the title is The Once and Future Liberal. And it's really this elegy for a real liberal politics that we seem to have lost and in its place we have this horror show of identity politics. So before we get into this, perhaps you can just summarize your background as a writer and political scientist and journalist. How do you describe what you have done and focused on as a writer? Well, the stuff that's relevant to this book, I think in my biography is I grew up in a place called Macomb County, Michigan, which is a blue collar county bordering on Detroit. Eminem. Grew up on Ten Mile Road. I grew up on Twelve Mile Road. So Macomb County used to be in early sixty s the most Democratic lopsidedly Democratic county in suburban county in America. By 1972 George Wallace won the Michigan primary and the county went for Nixon. And ever since political scientists have been studying it and pollsters have been studying it as the home of Reagan Democrats. And I saw this change happen in my life. I saw it happen with my neighbors. I saw it happen within my own family, extended family, not my close family. And I've been puzzling ever since then about why it is that the party and liberalism more generally lost the affection and the enthusiasm of what used to be their base, their white working class base and what might bring us back on course. So I started Wayne State University commuting putting myself through school, got a scholarship to Michigan and went off to the Kennedy School to study public policy. And when I was done I was offered a job on the Public Interest by my professor Daniel Bell. And the Public Interest was known as the first neoconservative magazine. But what neoconservative meant back in the 70s is that you were observing crystal like to put it, a liberal who had been mugged by reality. And what that meant was that you were still a liberal, but you realized that a lot of the solutions that or rather programs that we thought would solve social problems didn't do so well. And some of them were. Counterproductive realized that no one was paying attention to economic growth and also not paying attention to the white working class and the working class more generally. And so it was that the party had been sort of captured by the activist class. So people who had been involved with I forget what it was called the Coalition for Democratic Majorities so Bill Clinton came out of that. Pat Moynihan was part of that. He was on our board. And so being a conservative meant being a kind of reform liberal while liberalism sort of took off in its own direction after McGovern. And so ever since I've watched these various, you know, the lines between right and left and liberal and conservative move around. I don't feel I've moved that much. I've moved some but essentially I'm still the kind of prima governed liberal that I was back then. And so, you know, I've been writing, I've been writing in the New York Review of books about American politics, the American right. And then in my more scholarly work I've been writing about attacks, modern attacks on the Enlightenment. Well, let's define a few terms here because these key words that you use in the book. So let's start with liberal. How do you define liberal? What does it mean? And perhaps you could disentangle it from if it can be disentangled from the word left. Well, I think we have to talk about those two terms in the American context. The word liberal means something else in England. It means something very different on the continent where it essentially means just radical free market views. American liberalism was always, I think, founded or developed around two fundamental principles from the progressives through the New Deal. And the first was social solidarity that we stuck together, that the Hoover Republicans were happy to let people fall off by the side of the road. And the other is that there should be equal protection under the law. And so those two principles were the principles that liberals professed. They didn't always live up to those principles when it came to practice. And then I think what was added on to that was liberal anticommunism and no illusions about Marxism and especially communism as both in theory and in practice. And so there was a kind of liberal anticommunist consensus, certainly that continued from the New Deal down into the 1980s. And the left, I suppose you could say, include some of those liberals. But there are people on the left who, while they accept some of those two principles of solidarity and equal protection, have always had a soft spot, if not for communism than for Marxism, for movement politics, for radical movements seeking some sort of imaginary change, in my view. And so on the left, I would say there were the sober people who were the liberals and then everyone else. And what about the term progressive? Well, the word progressive originally was sort of the foundation of liberalism, but progressivism was also very patriotic. It's very interesting now to return to the writings of Teddy Roosevelt and to read his attacks on monopoly and his fight for protecting American workers, which was wrapped up with a kind of optimism about the country and the experiment that it is and a defense of America as a nation and as one nation. Without denying the kind of social diversity that we have. He believed in a kind of unifying citizenship. And people who called themselves progressive have held on to the economic message, but they've lost that sense of the nation. And that's what I'm trying to bring back in in my book. Yeah, you describe a time when liberals could salute the flag without embarrassment. And I must say that is a time before my time or certainly before any time I can remember. Liberalism, at least in my experience, has always been associated with it with a kind of cynical distance from anything that could be called patriotism without any kind of self consciousness. And I'm wondering when that happened. I mean, is this what Watergate and Vietnam did to liberalism? Well, I think it begins with the civil rights movement and the recognition that Democrats in particular had allowed Jim Crow to continue and flourish in the south. And that seemed to be a violation of what the country stood for and what liberalism seemed to stand for. And then, of course, Watergate, I think, was less important than Vietnam, which really broke the contract between the American government and the American people. I saw this quite intimately where I grew up. Where I grew up, a lot of kids served in Vietnam, and I had a paper route, and in the afternoons, I'd drive by a dusk, and I would see these stars in the window. Do you know what a star in the window used to be? No. Well, it used to be that if you had a child in the military, that the army, or whatever the service was, would send you a little flag with a star on it. And what people would do, they'd hang them in the window with the kind of Christmas light around it so you could see that they had someone there. And the flags came in two colors. There was one color if your child was alive, and there was another one if he or she had died there. And so you could just drive by. I could drove by on my bike, and I would just see all these lights and the two colors and know when it was that someone lost somebody. And I was an altar boy. I served at funerals of families that lost their sons, and and, you know, those people felt, on the one hand, betrayed by the government because it was clear that their sons were dying to no purpose. But they had even deeper anger at the elite class of journalists and writers and activists and kids on campus who were spitting on the flag that they had just used to drape the coffins of their sons. And I saw that happen before my eyes. And so it both disaffected these people from other liberals and also from the government itself, and made them cut them loose, in a way, for whoever came along. And Nixon came along promising to end the war. Reagan came along promising to make everything better, and on and on. And now Trump. Yeah, well, we'll talk about anger at the elites eventually, because that is at the center of so much of what's going on in our politics now, really, on both the left and the right, before we press on. What is identity politics? Well, I think the meaning of identity politics has changed, so I need to distinguish the kind of identity politics that began in the what we're living with now with the civil rights movement, you had a movement that was focused on one identity group, and then you had the women's movement that did the same. And the early gay rights movement. And those identity movements, in a sense, weren't about identity. They were about groups, but they weren't about so much about the inner experience of an identity. Rather, they were about making America fulfill its promise to make everyone an equal citizen. And so those movements were really about enfranchisement that you say, we're citizens and we're not full citizens. And so that is very consistent, to my mind, with the older liberal tradition. But then what happened in the on is that people who were wrapped up in the politics of these movements became very self referential. And for them, an identity was not something that bound people together and to the country, but rather it became a kind of way of reflecting on difference. And a lot of social movements broke apart on the basis of identity resentments. And so the New Left broke apart for all kinds of reasons. But one of them is that African Americans complained that they weren't part of the leadership, which is true. Women complained that they weren't part of the leadership, which was true. Lesbians complained that feminists were normalizing heterosexuality, which was also true. And so the united front of the Left broke down over these identity issues. And then what happened is that there was a retreat to the universities. And so people on the Left really abandoned electoral politics in these groups and instead developed this idea that all social change happens through social movements that are tied to identity. And you end up with gender theory, you end up with race theory, you end up with feminist theory, and you end up now with maybe three generations of young people, liberal elites who've been brought up in the university. To think about politics in terms of group and their own individual identities rather than of the common good and a message that might bind us together as a nation. You have a nice passage here on what happened to the New Left. Now I'm quoting you. The New Left was torn apart by all the intellectual and personal dynamics that plague every Left plus a new one identity. Racial divisions were quick to develop. Blacks complained that most leaders were white, which was true. Feminists complained that most all were men, which was also true. Soon, black women were complaining both about the sexism of radical black men and the implicit racism of white feminists, who themselves were being criticized by lesbians for presuming the naturalness of the heterosexual family. What all these groups wanted from politics was more than social justice and an end to the war, though they did want that. They also wanted there to be no space between what they felt inside and what they did out in the world. They wanted to feel at one with the political movements that mirrored how they understood and defined themselves as individuals. I love that. I mean, that picture of fragmentation seems exactly what has happened and that you have this what has been described as the the oppression Olympics, where there's an economy of victimhood, where certain identities trump others. And if you are a black lesbian, you're somewhere near the apex of grievance, and therefore, more or less anything you say is undeniable by someone who doesn't share your identity. If you're a black lesbian Muslim, well, then, better yet, I've been paying a little attention to the reception that your book has gotten. And so I noticed, for instance, the review in the New York Times, which had to be annoying to you. It was annoying to me. I hadn't even read your book, and it was obvious that that review was silly and unfair. And then I also saw the interview you did with David Remnick in The New Yorker, and he seemed, again, desperate to shore up some concept of identity politics. What has been your experience thus far in making your case post publication? And why do you think people are not readily seen? What is wrong with identity politics, both politically as a matter of just political pragmatics, but also intellectually and morally? Well, I think one of the reasons there are two reasons I think one of the reasons is that identity politics has really become an evangelical project and or it has all the all the markings of American revivalist religion. You know, the fact that we use the word woke, which comes from, you know, which comes from conversion, the great awakenings in this country, and especially over the past three, four years, for some reason, we've gotten into a panic about a lot of these issues that are real issues, but they've been around for a long time, and suddenly this developed a hypersensitivity about certain things. And there are reasons for that. What's happened with African Americans and the police and various other things? Charlottesville there are reasons for that, but it's also become dogmatic in the sense that it's not that people want you to agree with them or even just to work with you. They want you to believe they want you to accept their version of American history, their critique of American society, their particular critique of the police. And while you may agree with some of those things, what you look for in politics is kind of common ground, what you can agree on, like police mistreatment of African American motorists, for example, and you can work on that together. So they become people who won't take yes for an answer, I think, often. But the other thing is, I have felt in the reaction to the book that I put my finger on a real nerve or a sore spot, and that is that I keep saying in interviews, as I say in the book, that protecting minority groups is what we do as liberals. That's what we're about. You cannot protect anyone if you don't hold institutional power. Institutional power in this country is not just held in the presidency. It's held in the court, congress, and especially at the state and local level. If you are not competitive at the state and local level or the congressional level, you cannot protect anybody. Now, the only way to be successful at those levels is to have a message that reaches beyond your identity group. Therefore, if you want to actually protect African Americans, gays and lesbians just walking down the street holding hands, women who are being paid less than men. You need to hold power and you have to find a new message, not one based on yourself and your feelings and your identity, but a message about certain principles that you hold and that inform your political commitments, but that other people can also hold. And so these big themes of solidarity and equal protection, I think at just as principles most Americans hold to if you just ask them. But then once you get down to cases, then you're going to have disagreements that you can persuade people. But if you say to someone, you must understand me, but you cannot understand me because of who you are, you completely hermetically sealed yourself and you're unable to persuade anyone else. And so your politics become expressive and you fall in love with noble defeats. You become a bully too. That is what is left for you to do by way of persuasion, because reason has failed. There is to just bully people with, in this case, the threat of being called a racist. It's interesting, what you just said strikes me as a fairly complete recapitulation of what I recall Hillary Clinton saying when confronted by some Black Lives Matter people at one of her events. Yeah, I mentioned it briefly in the book, and I forget if it was at that time or not, but they weren't letting her speak. They had adopted these mama tactics of breaking into meetings, not letting people speak. And I forget if it was then or another time when Hillary Clinton pointed out that Martin Luther King would not have achieved his goals were it not for the practical politician LVJ who was willing to cut deals, cut deals with Dixiecrats and to make the civil rights legislation happen. The Great Society programs, movements alone cannot achieve anything, and institutional politics can always trump what movements have achieved. I mean, look what's happening at the state and local government in this country. The Democratic Party and feminist groups fought for a constitutional right for a woman to get an abortion. That was achieved. But in large parts of this country, a woman de facto cannot get an abortion. That is not because we haven't marched enough. It isn't because we haven't had enough court cases. It's because Democrats and liberals do not hold power at the state and local level, where in subtle and not so subtle ways, it's become impossible for people to run clinics where a woman can get an abortion, and they also feel under a threat of violence. And the only way to change that, the only way to make that right actual, is to go out to the south and the Southwest and find a way to convince those people to come over to your side. There's no other way. You got to get out of your bubble. You got to get out from behind your laptop and you got to go and meet people and talk to them just to reach your ends, not because you need to genuine flex to the white working class or Joe Six pack as if he's some sort of special figure. To achieve what you want to achieve, you've got to get out there. But you have argued that I think you say this in your book, perhaps this was just in an interview, but I believe you've argued that there's an asymmetry here between the right and the left. There's an identity politics of the right as well. But where identity politics is a losing strategy for liberals, it isn't necessarily a losing strategy on the right. That's right. It's hard to know what to say about this subject at this moment because ten years ago, when researchers would ask white people in surveys, how how important is your white identity? And do you feel whites are being discriminated against? You get maybe 5% now the figures are up over 25%. And why is that? Well, it's not that people have always felt that way. Rather, we have a right wing media, almost monopoly on news and parts of this country that have been able to play this up. And they've been able to play it up in part because we on the liberal side keep talking about identity. That's not to say that identity politics creates racism. It is to say that it can make it more salient at different moments. And the rise of this white consciousness, it's tied to all sorts of things, including social changes that have happened in the country, economic changes, the rise of a black middle class, the fact that women are in the workplace, and also the growth of a non working white male population. We're in a funny moment right now, but in this moment at least, it's certainly clear, and Steve Bannon said this himself, that the more we talk about difference and engage in sort of campus open a buffer, the more we help recruit people to the other side to say we have an identity too. Breitbart ran an article about my book saying, we've been saying this stuff for years and it's been working for us. And Steve Bannon said that in this famous interview with Bob Cutner that got him fired, he said, Keep talking about that issue. It's working for me, man. Just keep talking about them. Yeah. And on one level, it's just if you're going to practice identity politics, you shouldn't be surprised when white people eventually practice identity politics of their own. But is it a consequence of the fact that whites are still a majority in the country, that that it's it doesn't the identity aspect of it doesn't prove to be a liability in the same way? Actually, to give you just a little more material here, I wanted to read another passage which points up again, I don't know if this is the same asymmetry, but it certainly is an asymmetry. You talk about how the the web pages of the two parties differ. And you talk about, you know, on the Republican site at the time you wrote this, there was a essentially a white paper titled Principles for American Renewal. And just it was just a statement of positions of the party and just a vision for where the party wanted to take the country. And then you said on the Democratic website there was no such document. Now I'm quoting you. There's no such document to be found on the Democrats home page. Instead, when you scroll to the bottom of it, you find a list of links titled people, and each link takes you to a page tailored to appeal to a distinct group and identity women, Hispanics, quote, ethnic Americans, the LGBT community, native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders. There are 17 such groups and 17 separate messages. You might think that by some mistake you've landed on the website for the Lebanese government, not a party with a vision for America's future. I don't know if it's the same geometry of weakness there, but you can see how that kind of fragmentation where we means nothing but diverse groups, each of which is solely empowered to attest to its own grievances by virtue of its identity. That's not a moral or a political foundation from which to argue in ways that will attract people from outside your group to form a common cause with you. Yeah, one thing I've learned in talking about the book is that I should have emphasized one thing more that I say, but I needed to put it front and center, and that is that you cannot understand any social problem in America without talking about identity. You can't understand poverty. You cannot understand unemployment. You can't understand incarceration policy if you don't address how these policies affect many of these different groups. That's absolutely right, and we're more aware of that now, and that's a good thing. But when it comes to addressing those problems and building a common vision for the country that will appeal to people who aren't members of those groups, that's the time to employ a different kind of rhetoric. And so often the response I'm getting from people is, but how can we not talk about identity? Because identity is important in all these ways. That's true. So when you analyze, you know, what your commitments are once you understand the role of identity in this country, but in order to follow through and achieve a result out there and not simply express yourself and make yourself heard. Politics is not a speech act. Politics requires a common effort and persuasion, not self expression. And so it requires a kind of double mindedness, I would say now about identity, recognizing it to understand the country speaking in a different way in order to try to do something about it. I guess I'm going to sound more skeptical of identity than you do, at least in this moment. I hear you arguing that it's politically imprudent to emphasize identity as a matter if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org. You./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, I should say something about my last podcast with Meg's Maker. As you might recall, Meg is a documentarian who had her first feature length documentary accepted more or less everywhere, including Sundance and south by Southwest, and then she got attacked by identitarian grievance entrepreneurs and promptly defenestrated by Sundance and the other festivals. And this really was a case of picking absolutely the wrong target. You just have to listen to Meg for about ten minutes and you realize she's pretty much the last person who should have been canceled for making the film she made. Anyway, she has a GoFundMe page to support her ongoing efforts to get the film jihad rehab, now known as the Unredacted distributed. And when we recorded that episode, her GoFundMe had raised $3,000. But at the end of that episode, I asked you all to contribute if you could, and now Meg has raised over $600,000 in one week. So needless to say, her situation has completely changed and it will be fascinating to see what happens next. So thank you all for supporting her. Beyond changing the material prospects for the film, your notes of encouragement, I know, have made a tremendous difference over there. The outpouring of love and support was tremendous and it was really, really gratifying to see. I love seeing a podcast guest supported in that way. So thanks again for showing up. And on the topic of love and support, I can't say I received much for tweeting into the Kanye West, I guess now known as the Artist, known as Yay, formerly known as Kanye controversy. With respect to his recent eruptions of antisemitism, I haven't focused much on antisemitism in the past. I think I've devoted exactly one podcast to it out of 300. I've noticed it on the extreme right and the extreme left. Obviously, briefly, the way this breaks down is that on the extreme right, Jews are not considered white and therefore they fall within the scope of white nationalist racism with the added spin of various conspiracy theories. But on the extreme left, Jews are considered extra white. They get something like double the white privilege points, so they fall within the scope of anti white bigotry and activism. So you move far enough left or right as a Jew and you meet fairly stark expressions of hatred. So I've been aware of that. But it's not something that has been a big deal in my life, certainly, and it has not been my focus. Kanye's statement on this one podcast, I believe it was the Drink Champs podcast. I believe they've pulled down their version of the interview, but I think it's up on other channels. His remarks went on at such length and they so assiduously connected all the traditional dots for the antisemitic worldview that it was fairly breathtaking. It was really a Protocols of the Elders of Zion level confabulation about the Jewish control of everything. Unfortunately, there's enough truth in what he said, which is to say there are prominent Jews who have made a lot of money in the recording business and in Hollywood and the other sectors of the economy that he was whinging about. It will seem all too plausible in many quarters to say that he is just calling balls and strikes as he sees them, right? This wasn't hatred. This is just the facts. You have an extremely famous, popular and influential artist truly exploding with antisemitism. Many people thought I was reacting to something he had tweeted that got him kicked off Twitter. No, that's not what I was reacting to. I was reacting to the interview, which was truly awful. Awful. As much for the fact that he received basically no pushback from the hosts, and at least in the original comment thread on YouTube, he received nothing but adulation from his fans. And when I tweeted about this, pointing out how despicable it was, what I got back was pretty amazing. I have a fairly thick skin at this point. I don't expect a lot from Twitter comments, but the torrents of hatred and cynicism I received out of Trumpistan were fairly amazing. Some of it was overtly antisemitic, some of it was just expressions of hatred for what I had said about Hunter Biden's laptop. I got some pain from the left as well. People claiming that after all that I've said about Islam, I'm in no position to criticize someone for their bigotry. Obviously, this just voices Frank confusion about the meaning of what I've said about Islam. Perhaps I should spell this out once again so it's fresh in everybody's mind, because the degree of dangerous idiocy that swings on this fulcrum is hard to exaggerate. I have said some extremely critical things about Islam as a system of ideas. I've said extremely critical things about Judaism as a system of ideas. In fact, I even made Judaism to some degree culpable for the Holocaust. That sounds like a neo Nazi position if you don't understand what I'm saying. So I've said a lot about ideas that I think are terrible and divisive and producing unnecessary harm. This is quite different from talking about people as people, especially for characteristics they can't change. If you listen to Kanye's statements about Jews, it's absolutely clear he is not talking about the religious ideas of Jews. He's not talking about Judaism. He's not talking about ideas at all. He's talking about Jews much more as a race. And it's Jews as a race that are the targets of virtually all antisemitism. When I talk about Islam, I'm talking about the beliefs of people to the degree to which they believe them. Yes, occasionally I will talk about Muslims, because I can't keep saying people who believe in Islam to whatever degree, but it's always clear in context what I'm actually talking about. There is zero xenophobia implied by my criticism of Islam. And what's more, I have said that with respect to immigration, there are no people I would rather have given green cards than moderate Muslims. I said that in response to Trump's idiotic Muslim ban. So you just have to follow me long enough to know what my attitude actually is toward Muslims as people. And I've regularly pointed out that there's nobody who suffers the consequences of the idiotic ideas contained within traditional Islam more than Muslims, more than Muslim women and apostates and aspiring intellectuals. Once again, if this is at all confusing, please recognize that criticizing Islam is like criticizing Marxism or Scientology. We're not talking about skin color or country of origin or anything else than the consequences of a specific set of ideas. And what I've criticized in Islam again and again and again really, I will admit ad nauseam, are the consequences of specific beliefs about jihadism and martyrdom and apostasy and blasphemy, and none of that entails bigotry against people. And yet I was inundated with moronic allegations of bigotry, even by some well known people, in response to my criticism of Kanye's. Absolutely crystal clear antisemitism. Yes. Kanye's Bipolar. I'm sure he suffers from that. Being bipolar doesn't make you antisemitic. That particular problem doesn't come with ideological content. So this struck me as genuinely new. Having a star of Kanye's size express that degree of antisemitism and to have it be celebrated at the level that it was seems genuinely new to me. This is not Mel Gibson on the side of the highway raving at the cops while getting arrested for drunk driving. So it seemed like a cultural moment worth addressing and clearly condemning, and I'm pretty surprised at the people who couldn't quite manage that. Anyway, for my troubles there, I got an extraordinary amount of hatred directed at me, mostly from Trumpistan, which provides further indication, as if one were needed, that there's a fair amount of antisemitism to be found there. I suspect this problem isn't going away anytime soon. We'll see what happens if the orange menace runs for President again, and perhaps I'll say something more on this topic at some point. One thing to notice over Waking Up, we built a live audio feature which allowed me to do a Q and A live earlier this week. I think something like 14 15,000 of you showed up for that. That was great, and I think we'll be building out that feature and using it more going forward. So if you follow me on Twitter, you might occasionally see me say, I'm on the app for the next hour, ask me anything, and hopefully we'll all find that useful. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Timothy Snyder. Tim is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of many books, among them On Tyranny, Black Earth, Bloodlands and the Road to Unfreedom. His work has received many prizes, and Tim has distinguished himself as a remarkably clear and urgent voice on the topic of fascist and quasi fascist propaganda, the way in which it seeks to erode democratic freedom globally. And he is especially an expert on Ukraine. And so I wanted to get his point of view on what's happening there in its ongoing war with Russia and its implications for nuclear risk. And in particular, I wanted him to address much of the commentary I've been seeing online from non subject matter experts, people like Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sachs, the physicist Max Tegmark, the economist Jeffrey Sachs. There are many people who've been calling with increasing urgency for a reset of our approach to supporting Ukraine. They've been calling for de escalation. They have been, to the eyes of many, dignifying Putin's claims about the provocations of NATO and NATO expansion. So I wanted to get a clear statement from Timothy about all this. I have no illusions that this is the final word on the matter, but it is, as you'll hear, a deeply informed word. And it's one that echoes many of my far less informed misgivings about what I've been hearing largely on social media from, again, very prominent people who are speaking very much in the vein of what I've called the new contrarianism. Everybody with and without a platform is now doing their own research and promulgating their resulting opinions however they can. And the results on many topics is a cacophony of unqualified voices. Whether we're talking about COVID or climate change or the war in Ukraine, this is just now the new norm, to have anti establishment voices create more and more noise, and sometimes this is to the good. I'm not saying it never makes sense to do your own research, but there is something to be said for expertise now and again. So I wanted to get an expert on Ukraine to come on the show to give us the lay of the land as he sees it. And that's what I've done. So now I bring you Timothy Snyder. I am here with Timothy Snyder. Tim, thanks for joining me again. Really glad to be with you again. So I've really been eager to talk to you. First, I should say that you've been on the podcast at least once before. We spoke about your book on Tyranny, which you've recently updated in audio format to COVID the war in Ukraine. And I've listened to that audio, and it's really fantastic. So I recommend that people download that now. You are a genuine subject matter expert on Ukraine and Russia, unlike many people who are spending a lot of time online at the moment, telling the world what we should all think about the war in Ukraine. Before we jump in, can you summarize your engagement with this topic? How have you come to know about Ukraine and Russia? Well, first of all, I want to thank you for remembering that the things that I maybe understand about America, I probably had my you know, I got my intuitions from other places. I've been working on East European history. My entire adult life is beginning more than 30 years ago. I went to Kiev for the first time almost 30 years ago. I've been speaking Ukrainian in Kiev, in Ukraine for more than half my life, working in Russian and Ukrainian sources for more than half my life. And I've I've been to the country regularly for the past quarter century. I've written six books that are of that are Ukrainian history or that bear on Ukrainian history, the the most well known of which is probably bloodlands Europe between Hitler. Yeah. And would I be right to assume that you currently know people who are fighting in this war or certainly experiencing its results firsthand in Ukraine? Yeah, I know hundreds of people in Ukraine. And just to give one little, tiny example, on the Monday before the war started, I was doing a doctoral exam, and the student passed. He was a wonderful, wonderful dissertation, and the next day, he signed up for the territorial defense. Everybody I know in Ukraine is involved in the war. Somehow. A large number of men and women who I know are in the army or in the territorial defense, and those who aren't are generally all doing something. Which is, of course, part of the reasons, part of the mystery as to why the Ukrainians are winning this war is that people are so active in civil society looking to fill the gaps that the state can't fill. That's a story which is kind of hard to write, but it's it's it's a fundamental feature of Ukrainian society. I really want to target a specific audience in our conversation. I think we'll take a few passes over the terrain to actually get down to bedrock. But here's what I most want to address, and I know you're going to have to COVID a fair amount of history before we get there, but what I most want to COVID are the doubts and fears of very bright, rational people who, at this point, think that US. And EU support of Ukraine has gone too far, and that we're running the risk of plunging into something like World War III quite unnecessarily, and that we, in some sense, provoked Putin, or at least we're culpable for our own failures of diplomacy and that NATO essentially. And the United States has backed him into a corner and put him in a position where his behavior is now pretty rational and even defensible from some non sinister angle. And again, you will be familiar with much of this. But if I look at my Twitter experience, I'm seeing many smart, well connected people, some of whom have very large platforms, as I said, none of whom are subject matter experts. But they're not Dummies, and yet they're speaking as though Putin has some kind of reasonable, as I said, non sinister claim upon the patients of the world at this point, and that we should step back and get Ukrainians to step back. And that there has to be some kind of path to de escalation here that isn't an abject capitulation to the threats of a tyrant. And just to kind of round this out, the cynical take here is that most Americans can't find Ukraine on a map, right, and still can't. And yet many are speaking about the donbass as though the blood of Ukrainian mothers runs in their veins, and that we've been propagandized to by a weird union of a neoliberal neoconservative order. And all doubts about the wisdom of this project and the wisdom of going all in on Ukraine is they're being silenced. And this is all kind of an escalatory ratchet towards something awful, the true awfulness being a proper exchange of nuclear weapons between the US. And Russia. So I want us to defuse all of that. And I know you have to get into some relevant history before we get there, but that's where I want to put that flag on the horizon, and I want us to aim at it. Yeah, that's fine with me. I think you'll probably have to have to break it up into little pieces. I will. What you're talking about is kind of you're giving a take on a bunch of takes, which are pretty far away from any recognizable empirical reality having to do with Russia or Ukraine or, for that US. I'll just say a little bit of the US. Before we get into the other parts. The idea that the US Was expecting this scenario and is somehow behind it is not only wrong, but deeply colonial. The US expected that this war was going to be over in three days. That was the official American position, and that was the basis for our actions at the beginning of the war. Very important to understand that the Ukrainians are people who have agency and who have taken risks and decisions. And the risks and decisions that they have taken have, in turn, affected Russia and America. I think a lot of the thinking, or some of the problems in the thinking that you're describing starts from the unspoken assumption that places like America and Russia are real countries and Ukraine is not. And once you start from there, you then have to twist yourself around an awful lot to try to understand what's happening. So I think that's a basic I would start out with, I think the idea that somehow America is behind all of this. It might be left wing imperialism, but it's imperialism because it's overlooking the agency that small and medium sized countries can have. And it's overlooking the decision, the ethically based decision that Ukrainians took when they decided they would defend their country from this atrocious war. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back in time, however far back you think we need to go to get to the present. I think the question I would give you to frame this part of the conversation is to describe the reality of Ukraine and Crimea and their relationship to Russia. Because obviously what is being said by Russia and being taken at face value by many critics of our support of Ukraine is that Ukraine was always part of Russia or has been part of Russia for so long that it is some kind of a historical obscenity to consider it its own real country, as you just described it to be. So how should we think about Ukraine and Crimea? I guess it should be separated there and Russia. I guess the first point which is really important is that I might know more history than other people, and I might have interesting things to say in response to your question, and I'll try to say them, but it is actually irrelevant. The border between the Russian Federation and Ukraine was agreed upon by both parties in December of 1991. Both parties are signatories of the basic conventions about involving borders. And it may seem like a really banal point, but history doesn't actually give you a reason for invading someone else's territory. If it did, there essentially is no border in the world, including the American Canadian border or the American Mexican border, which you could say is somehow perfectly legitimated or justified by history. That's just not the way that history works. History and large two different things. And so the unspoken assumption here is that if Russia had some kind of historical claim, then it would be okay to invade. But I would start by that assumption is 100% wrong, and that people who want to make if you want to make that assumption about Russia, you should be saying in general. Well, we would like for there to be warfare on every continent except Antarctica, because everywhere in the world there are disagreements about history, which would then justify war. The history is interesting. It's a lot more interesting than listening to Mr. Putin would get you to think. You used an interesting word, which is always and always. Whenever everyone says always in these things, what is happening is that an imperial claim is being made. It's imperial powers who say things like always and never. And what they're doing is they're asserting their right to control the forms of knowledge which get the rest of us to thinking that, wow, there isn't really something there. So in the case of Crimea. There was a state in Crimea which lasted for six centuries which is much longer than the United States or Russia in any recognizable form. And that state existed for two years as part of the golden horde sorry, two centuries as part of the golden horde, four centuries as part of the crime, and hana which was defeated and eliminated as a political unit by the Russian empire in the late 18th century. So that's not always. First of all, that's an awful lot of centuries before anything Russian power gets there. It's defeated by a bunch of Ukrainian cossacks in the Russian service, by an empress, Catherine the great, who's German, and by a state, the Russian empire, which is, which is nationally speaking or linguistically speaking majority, not Russian. That state ceases to exist in 1918 or 1917 sorry and is not the same state as today's russian federation. The native people of Crimea, who were almost 100% of the population not so very long ago were dispersed by first the Russian empire and then Stalin in 1944. In 1944, the incheda the Stalinist secret police forcibly deported every single man, woman and child who was a Crimean Tatar, thereby leaving open an awful lot of space for Russians and other people from the Soviet union to move in. That's 1944. That's not always. In 1956, the Crimean peninsula still inside the Soviet union was given from the Russian part of the Soviet Union to the Ukrainian part of the Soviet union because there were no longer any Crimean Tatars there. There was no longer a special status for the place. It was no longer an autonomous region as it had been. It was given to Ukraine for the very banal reason that from the point of view of Ukraine, crimea is a peninsula. There's a land connection. So you can supply it with water and you can use electricity grid. From the point of view of Russia, crimea is an island. There's no land connection. But Khrushchev in 1954 when he made this change, dressed it up because of course there's always difficulty with Ukraine in the Soviet union. So he dressed it up as some kind of great gift from the Soviet Union to Ukraine. And they had lots of celebrations and they printed cigarette packs and they printed nightgowns celebrating all this stuff. And so then some people now in the Soviet union remember this is this great gift, especially Russian nationalists. But at the time it was a purely pragmatic decision. So that's Crimea, the idea that Crimea is always Russian is a imperial, b wrong and c silences the history of the genocide of its native population. The history is very interesting and again you go into it considerable length in both your your reissue of the audio of on tyranny and also in in a I believe a ten part lecture series on YouTube on Ukraine that people can watch from your Yale class. But I really love the point you made about the disjunction between the stories we tell about history and the legal and political reality of that enforces any national border at this moment in time. And it's always hard to know where to start the clock, except when you have a treaty or when you have a border that has been ratified by both sides of that border. That is a very reasonable place to stop your wayback machine. So perhaps let's start with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. What's the significance of that for the present moment? And if you want to bring the character of Putin into the conversation at this point, that might be appropriate, because but, you know, Putin is very much driving the show here, and it's his decisions that we're living with the consequences of and trying to figure out how to respond to. And he has evolved as a person and as a leader over these last decades. Tell us about the fall of the Soviet Union and how that is setting the stage for where we are now. Yeah, I appreciate, Sam, you're reinforcing the point about law because it really is a very important point. I mean, we can choose to sympathize with anyone we want who is violating law. But as a result of the Second World War, as a result, in part of Hitler making exactly the kinds of arguments that Putin is making now, the principle was accepted that we're going to have sovereign borders. No, sovereign borders are not going to change. And that's a principle which has generally been of great benefit, especially inside Europe. I'm going to start this answer by making a similar distinction between Putin and the end of the Soviet Union. Putin says a lot of things about the end of the Soviet Union now, which he wouldn't have said then. And he says a lot of things now which people find plausible because he says them over and over again, but which are simply not true. One of them is that the end of the Soviet Union was somehow an American plot. I was there at the time. I mean, I wasn't of any significance, but I was in Washington, DC. Working on foreign policy stuff at the time. I was helping to run conferences at the time. I was in U. S. Soviet relations was what I did at the time. I was going to Moscow at the time. It was American policy to preserve the Soviet Union. And that's clear from the American archival material. It's clear from the open source material about Bush's visit to Kiev in September of 1991, which is remembered as the Chicken Kiev visit. We were actually trying to hold the thing together. It was the Russian Federation, the country that Putin now rules, which brought the Soviet Union to an end. And that's a kind of fundamental fact which tends to get overlooked in all of this, because Putin starts his story from such completely outrageous places, knowing that there will be people out there who will somehow meet him halfway. But that's not really how one should treat the historical record. So the end of the Soviet Union, I mean, one thing which is interesting about the Soviet Union is that its very existence is a recognition of the existence of a Ukrainian nation. The reason why the Soviet Union was founded as the Soviet Union in December of 1922 was that the people who founded the Soviet Union, bolsheviks and cosmopolitans though they were, were familiar from several years of civil war inside Ukraine that the Ukrainian nation was a real thing. As a result of that, when they won and they established their larger unit, they made it the unit of nominal federal republics. So Ukraine actually decides the form of the Soviet Union because of the obvious, even to people like Stalin and Lenin existence of the Ukrainian nation. And even though Ukraine inside the Soviet Union suffers more than any other republic from Soviet policies, in particular the famine of 1932 and 1933, there's never actually a moment in the Soviet Union where the existence of a Ukrainian nation is denied. And I stress this because the phenomenon that we see now with Russian nationalism and Mr. Putin at this point is actually quite radical and fairly new. And insofar as it has a precedent, its precedent is with right wing is not really the Soviet Union. It's rather with right wing and fascist Russian intellectuals of an earlier period. But the thing then which is worth stressing kind of bringing two points together now is that when the Soviet Union falls apart, it's also taken for granted that the borders of the republics will be the borders of independent states. In December of 1991, the leaders of the Russian yellow, russian and Ukrainian republics meet and agree to dissolve the Soviet Union. The reason why it's those three is that those are the three republics which existed in 1922 when the Soviet Union was founded and which still existed in 1991. And so they agreed that the borders as they were would be their borders, at which point these states become sovereign states governed by governed by the the same conventions that govern everyone else's borders. And those things aren't contested. And Ukraine actually has a referendum on its territory before all of this, and also in December, in which not only do 90% of Ukrainians and this is 31 years ago not only do 91 90% of Ukrainians vote for independence, a majority in every single region of Ukraine also votes for independence. And in those intervening 30 years, the drift has been, and I say this with great understatement the drift has only been in one direction. And that direction has been in favor of the notion that there is a separate Ukraine that deserves to have a Ukrainian state. Okay, so let's bring Putin into this. How has his thinking evolved here? Because I guess he. Came back in 2012, correct me if I'm wrong, and there's a kind of crazy making degree of unreality to his politics, right? I mean, this is a quasi fascist regime. Maybe it's just appropriate to just call it a fascist regime. It's definitely a single party state that, on your account, which I agree with, is engaged in an imperialistic war against a democracy, and yet is framed rather often from Putin's side as a war of denaturificationation of Ukraine, right? So he's the good guy going against the Nazis. It's inconvenient for that thesis that the president of Ukraine is Jewish, but that's really not an obstacle to the claim. And while I haven't noticed many high profile people on our side dignify the Nazi part of it, actually there is at least one exception to that. There's something happening in America in fairly high profile right of center or even centrist circles, where the perversity of Putin's framing is not only not noticed, it is denied, at least implicitly. I'll bring in one specific claim here just so you have something to react to. But for instance, I noticed the Economist at Columbia, Jeffrey Sachs, on some podcast talking about this, and it's hard to imagine the Kremlin not liking anything he said. He essentially said that the US and NATO have been provocative all along, and that the off ramp for Russia was always obvious. We just have to declare the neutrality of Ukraine and give an assurance that they'll never join NATO, because that obviously impinges on Russia's core security concerns. How would we feel if, you know, we had a Russian client state in Mexico or Canada, and there are many people saying things like this. I mean, one thing that's perverse about that, which I'll just point out before you give me the rest. But I mean, immediately, what strikes me as perverse is that it conceives that we are the moral equivalent of Russian despotism, right? And that the spread of democracy is no better than the spread of fascism. You try to flip things around in that way, it's just who's to say anything is better than anything else in terms of spreading a political orientation over the surface of the earth? And that's just so dishonest and ethically upside down that it's just amazing to see academics in America talking that way. This is something you speak about in your book. I think you call it Schizo fascism, the condition in which fascists themselves are claiming to be at war with fascists and Nazis. And it's pretty much pure fiction. Thanks for mentioning that the book in question is now Road to Unfreedom, where I do a very careful and slow dissection of all of this on the basis of the Russian primary sources, on the basis of everything that Putin said that I could track down over the period of his two presidencies. And in starting thinking of your question, it's clear that there was a kind of evolution with Putin. Putin, number one, his first couple of terms in office, was perhaps sincerely trying to carry out what he called a dictatorship of the law and centralized power. But it turned out that in centralizing power, in doing away with the other oligarchs, he and the people around him just became the chief oligarchs. So what Putin ends up with is a dysfunctional state, the most interesting feature of which is the extreme economic inequality. And that is a point which is really worth dwelling on for a minute, because it's only when you have the kind of power that he has and the kind of money that he has, that you're allowed to get away with the sort of lunatic ideas that he expresses. It may seem like a simple thing, but the fact that he's been in power for 20 years and controls the five television networks and has lots of money to spread around among influential people around the world without those things. I mean, he's just a guy on a street corner, probably with a pretty tattered looking soapbox, because his ideas in themselves are not neither original nor particularly convincing. But anyway, my point was that in Putin stage two, when he comes back, he's recognized that he can't make the Russian state function, or at least making it function, as inconsistent with him being the chief oligarch and being able to give his friends billions of dollars if he wants to. And so he moves to a politics of spectacle, where, of course, Russia is always right, whether it's intervening in Ukraine in 2014 or intervening in Syria in 2015, where everything becomes a kind of show, where Russia is always innocent and the other side is always to blame. And he develops, from about 2011 forward ideas about how Russia doesn't have to follow the rules, because Russia has a special destiny and Russia has a special mission, and Russia has a special civilization, and no one else can force understand this, but Russia has the right to do whatever it likes. And this is this fundamental challenge to international order, western, non Western, any kind of order. He's been espousing for about a decade. He made it very clear on September 30, talking about the annexations, when he said, what are the rules? Who made up the rules? Russia has a millennial mission, right. And these ideas are already more than tinged with fascism. A person that he cites regularly and who probably, by no coincidence, he also cited on September 30 this year, yvonne Lean, is the chief Russian fascist thinker, and he became essentially the house philosopher. Putin was citing him all of the time, but not only him. Contemporary Russian fascists began to get airtime on television and became part of the mainstream Russian discussion. Which leads me to I mean, the thing about the Schizophasm actually, Tim, can you just define fascism? Yeah, fascism is the idea that it's not rationality. That's the basis on which we build politics, it is will and imagination that rules are not the basis upon which we interact. We interact on the basis of strength. Strength is always proven as a matter of practice. Therefore, endless conflict is entirely normal. And given all of that, politics begins not with any kind of mutual recognition, but with the choice of an enemy. When I choose my enemy, then I know who I am. And the moment that I've chosen an enemy, that's when politics can actually begin. And that takes you pretty far, actually, towards understanding the Russian attitude towards Ukraine. Because one of the problems with Putin's rule is that he has no definition of Russia at all. He has no notion of what the future of Russia will be, nor can he from the state of oligarchy. Therefore, Russia is defined as the anti Ukraine, and it takes this arbitrary choice of an enemy in order to give meaning, which is also related to NATO. Now, I'm just going to be very straightforward about this. Russia is not afraid of NATO at all. Had they been afraid of NATO, they certainly wouldn't have undertaken an invasion like this. Right. And had they been afraid of NATO, they wouldn't be moving the the bulk of their troops from the actual NATO borders in order to fight in Ukraine, which is what they have done. They're not afraid of a NATO invasion. They've never been afraid of a NATO invasion. This is a giant guilt making factory. They're not afraid that NATO is going to invade them. Yep. Putin himself, until very late in the day, did not say anything to the effect that he was afraid of NATO. This is something he came up rather late so that we could so that we could have a guilt trap for ourselves. Your point about there being a difference between spreading democracy and not spreading democracy is well taken. But I think perhaps an even more fundamental point is that NATO it's not that NATO or the European Union in large NATO and the European Union take on new members when sovereign states, backed by their populations to express themselves in democratic elections, choose to join those institutions. The reasons why Poland is in the European Union or NATO do not have to do with Brussels or Washington. They fundamentally have to do with the polls. And the reasons why Ukraine would like to join institutions doesn't have to do with Brussels or Washington. It has to do with the lived experience of the Ukrainians themselves. And it seems to me that, if anything, that's an even more fundamental difference, that what Russia is trying to do is expand an order illegally, by force, whereas the European Union and NATO take on new members when independent states choose to join them. Yeah, well, let's cycle on that .1 more time, because I think it's crucial. So you're saying that Putin and Russia have no fear of invasion from the west? Right. It seems completely crazy to me that any Western power would want to invade Russia. But a person could be forgiven for believing that Putin might believe such a thing would be possible, and that he therefore would want Ukraine as a buffer between him and an antagonistic Europe. But you're saying that's just not the case. Well, that option was available to Putin, and he chose not to take it. The Ukraine had agreed to Russian base, russian bases on the Black Sea for decades. When Russia invaded in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, it was it was giving up as a result of its own decision, the possibility of a friendly Ukrainian buffer to the west. When you invade a country, you no longer have the option of treating it as a friendly buffer. When you invade a country, you're making an enemy of it. That was a choice that Moscow made on its own. One can decide that it was a mistake or not a mistake, but that option was available. They have pushed Ukraine to the west again and again with their own decisions. Before 2014, a majority of Ukrainians were against joining NATO. After Russia invaded in 2014, a majority of Ukrainians unsurprisingly decided that they were in favor of joining NATO. That's a result of Russia's choices. So that option was there. But that's not what they want. What they want to be able to I mean, and this is what they say openly, day in, day out on television, from the Foreign Ministry, from the President's office, from the Security Council. Day in and day out, what they say the commander in chief of the operation just said it yesterday what they say is they want a Ukraine where they are in control. And that's something completely different. That means invading the country, occupying it, replacing its leadership with someone else. That's not a friendly buffer. That's a genocidal aspiration. And that's what they care about. Again, to repeat the point, if they cared about security from NATO, which they don't, but if they cared about security from NATO, they would be dispersing their armed forces around the Finnish border, around the Polish border. They'd be concerned about places like that. That's not what they're doing. What they're doing is they are throwing absurd, an obscene amount of their available firepower into the project of destroying Ukraine as a country, which I'm just going to take a big step back here makes zero geopolitical sense. It is weakening Russia extraordinarily. And the reason I'm taking a big step back is that one of the assumptions that we're making in this conversation, or at least one of the assumptions that's made in the views that you're presenting, is that Putin actually cares about the interests of Russia. I think that's an assumption which should be made explicit and questioned. I see very little reason to think that Putin is a geopolitician who cares at all about the interests of Russia. If he were he would be much more concerned about the fact that there is a great power on Russia's border, which in fact, does have designs, unlike the United States, on Russian resources, which, unlike the United States, invests more in the Asian part of Russia than Russia does itself, and that is China. But rather than being concerned about China, what Putin has done with his entire antiwestern turn is to create a situation in which future rulers of Russia will have little choice but to be vassals of China. And the invasion of Ukraine has only accelerated this process. Troops that might have been defending the border with Russia have been brought west to fight a losing and pointless war in Ukraine, while Beijing just watches as the power relationship with Russia, which was already very much in its favor, accelerates, to the point where it's just hard to imagine that Russia is going to be able to get out from under it. A Russian leader who cared about geopolitics, who cared about Russian interests, would be balancing between the west and Russia. It is geopolitically absolutely idiotic to go so far in one direction that you can't come back, but that's what Putin has done. I don't think he's an idiot. I think he simply doesn't care about Russian interests. So what does he care about? He cares about dying in bed. He cares about being a legacy. I appreciate your earlier questions about Putin, which lead in profound directions, which I haven't always been able to follow in my answers. We have to think of this person as someone who's been in power for the lifetimes of many people who live in Russia. Many people in Russia can't remember anyone else. This is someone who's been in power for the entirety of this century. This is someone who is on a classical, as described by Plato, as described by Shakespeare, tyrannical trajectory, where at a certain point, he's no longer able to hear the advice of others. At a certain point, his own fantasies start to become realer than the reality around him. I think there's no question that his obsession with Ukraine is real. I think he really thinks something along the lines of historically weird fantasies that he projects. I think he really thinks that somehow, somewhere there really are Ukrainians down there who believe that they want to be invaded by him. But I think that that is a classical tyrannical mistake. And he is doing that thing that tyrants do when they're in power for too long, which is they commit state resources to their own fantasies. That's the tragedy of tyranny. And that's where Putin is right now. So right now, he's in the grip of a fantasy which doesn't have anything to do with interests or with geopolitics. I think if we take a deep breath and look coldly at Russia's geopolitical position, we can generally agree that this has been an asinine move. He is in the grip of something which can't be reduced to interests or doesn't have much to do with the state. What he thought he was doing in invading Ukraine was leaving a legacy. What he thought he was doing in invading Ukraine was leaving an indelible mark, his own mark on history, where he would be remembered as the person who united what he thinks of as the Russian lands, as Peter the Great did, as Catherine the Great did. I think that's what he thinks he was doing. He's not going to be able to do that because the world is just not the way that he thinks the world is. But I think that's what has him in its grip. Well, he's also been doing a bit more than that in that he's been launching a larger war, mostly a cyber war against Western freedom, really. There's been this, I believe you call it a hybrid warfare at various points, where the goal seems to be to destabilize democracies generally. Perhaps now is a good moment to say something about that, and how that what we've seen of that since, I guess, 2014, in the first war in Ukraine. I appreciate that question and I appreciate your earlier remark about there being a difference between democracy and other systems. And I guess I rather wish that in these conversations which seem to be about Putin, I don't mean yours and mine. I mean the kinds of discussions that you are refereeing here, people would admit, like, which of three positions they take. Because I think there are a lot of people out there who just like fascism, and I think they should just often own it, that they like fascism and that's why they like Putin. And I think that would clarify matters. I think the second position is I really don't believe in anything. I'm a complete nihilist. I have no preference between democracy and other thing. In that position, you can also say, Well, Putin is fine because there is no truth, there are no values. Yada, yada, right. Then there's a third position. I'm sure there are others, but there's a third position which says, actually people seem to like to vote, whether they're in Iran or whether they're in Russia or whether they're in Portland, Oregon. They seem to like to vote in countries where people are able to vote and a representative seem to be peaceful and prosperous and freer, and people seem to live lives where they're more satisfied and so on. I think it would be kind of like, in some way, this discussion about Putin is a proxy for all of that, where the people who are slightly afraid to say, yeah, I'm a fascist, or, yeah, I'm a nihilist. Are willing to say, well, I think maybe Putin's okay. Or I think maybe what's happening here is fine. And now semi forgotten where you want. Actually, let me add one more cohort there, because I guess it's Nihilist adjacent, but they certainly wouldn't think of themselves as nihilists. And these are all the people, most of whom are in Trumpistan. So I think I'm talking about maybe 40% of American society who think that more or less, everything said about Russia attempting to destabilize democracy, in particular our own, and especially their attempt to hack the 2016 presidential election, amounted to a lie, just a pure confection of the Democratic Party. Wherever it is true, you know, even if someone were going to concede that some aspects of those allegations are true, it's unimportant, because we do the same thing to other countries. This came out explicitly when Trump himself said, well, you think our hands are so clean? We've been pretty bad too. So we had the spectacle of a sitting US. President who said he trusted Putin and his intelligence services over his own intelligence services, and something like half the country was happy to go with that. And they think that basically this all gets summarized under the rubric of the Russia Collusion hoax, right? Like, anywhere, right of center. Now all you need to say is the Russia Collusion hoax to discredit any concern about Russia's misinformation campaign that's happened on, you know, dozens of fronts for years, which has created a politics of unreality within our own society, in large part. So, anyway, we might call that nihilistic, but I think most of these people think that they're not nihilists. They want to put American interests first. They want us to be essentially they want us to pull back from our engagement with a fairly crazy world and close our borders. And they want to get back to the good things of making America great again. So that's not nihilism. It's a kind of delusion, and it's a complete loss of contact with certain moral imperatives of the moment, I would say. But I think it is a different cohort. And there's a fair amount of evidence at this point that Russia has had more than a little bit to do with creating these perceptions. Yeah, no, there's a deep philosophical consistency here, because what happens in Russian domestic politics is that Putin finds himself in a place where he can't meaningfully promise Russian a better future. And one of the moves he makes at that point, very effectively helped by a very intelligent propagandist called Lettuce Lava Sotokov, is to argue that, well, actually, things may seem lousy in Russia, and maybe we close down your small business for no reason. And maybe there's very little social mobility, and maybe wealth is horribly badly distributed, and maybe your vote doesn't really count. But if you look around the world, the Putin line, it's actually all the same everywhere. It's the same in Britain. It's the same in the United States. And so the move that their propaganda makes is very different from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union actually still said there are good things, and we're moving towards those good things that might have been a lie, but it was a lie in a world where there was still truth. What the Putin propaganda does is that it says, look, nothing's really any good. Russia's rotten, we admit it, but Britain is just as bad, and America is just as bad. And then they just hit on the things which are bad about us, and they put them right in the center and they make them the absolute essence of our countries. So that is a kind of programmatic nihilism. It's a way to stay in power when you can no longer actually operate a state in the way that it's normally thought of as being beneficial to people. That connects with where we are in our politics, where we begin to doubt that the state can do things for us or that the state represents us, and then we are captured. And I'm not saying that the Russians are the only ones responsible for this. I'm saying what the Russians are doing is they're pushing forward like they're the avant guard in this general tendency to say, well, who knows whether our system is better than their system, right? Who knows whether it was better, whether Russia does this and we do all this. And so when Trump says, I trust their services more than our services, he has good reason to trust their services, because his services did much more for him than our services ever could do. But when Americans follow that and they say, well, it's kind of all the same, then that's not just adjacent to nihilism. That actually is nihilism, because what you're doing and you're using that way is you're saying, well, no matter how bad something is, it's probably just as bad somewhere else. And you can't really build up a democracy on that basis. I mean, to build up a democracy, you have to have some notion that you can improve things, that some values are real, that law does matter, that we can organize ourselves in ways that are better than other ways. And at the practical level, you're speaking to the right here, but at the practical level, this kind of posture also turns up on the left, where the existence of Russia just becomes an occasion to point out that America did things which was bad. And of course we did right. But that doesn't actually answer the question. I mean, if you know, if people if Russia is committing a genocide in Ukraine, and we say, well, yes, we did terrible things in Iraq, okay, that's fine. That means that countries shouldn't carry out illegal wars. So there's a principle there, and I'm happy to defend that principle. But the way it goes illogically and I think politically destructively, is for people to say, well, on the one hand, on the other hand, as though that were dispositive. And that just brings us to this nihilism. And with the nihilism, Russia wins because they're not aiming for anything else. They don't really need for us to believe that the Ukrainians are Nazis, right? They obviously don't believe that themselves. They don't really need for us to believe that Ukraine doesn't exist. They just need for us to be somewhere. They just need for us to be in nowhere land where we struck our shoulders and we say, well, who knows? Maybe we did something like that at some point. That's all they're aiming for. That's really all they're aiming for. And unfortunately, they're getting a lot of it. Okay, well, I know you have a hard stop in about 40 minutes now, so I don't want us to be short on time to address the nuclear elephant in the room, right? So many people think that we are running an intolerable risk by not doing everything we could possibly do to de escalate the situation. I want to give you some examples of this from what I've seen on social media, and I want us to analyze them. Because if you're not someone who's been, as you have been really in the weeds of Ukrainian and Russian history and politics, it's easy to think, well, there's got to be a reason why Ukraine is not a NATO state, right? And we're not treaty bound to defend it like it is. One, it's not, therefore, a core American national interest. So how is it that we are not doing everything we can do to mollify Putin at this point, right? Because this is a situation of nuclear blackmail. It even gets worse somehow if we accede to the idea that he doesn't even have Russia's interest at heart. He's just a tyrant who's psychologically unraveling. And he's given some speeches of late which suggest a kind of unraveling of a quasi religious sort. He gave one speech about a month ago where he sounded practically like a jihadist in terms of the other worldliness that was creeping into his claims. So why are we just not doing everything we can to get off this ride? And so I'll give you just a few examples of this. The venture capitalist David Sachs has been making a lot of noise about this, and he wrote an op ed in Newsweek recently, and this is a quote the online mob has decided that any support for a negotiated settlement even proposals that Zelensky himself appeared to support at the beginning of the war is tantamount to taking Russia's side, denouncing voices of compromise and restraint as Putin apologists. This removes them from acceptable discourse and shrinks the overton window to those advocating the total defeat of Russia and an end to Putin's regime, even if it risks World War III. Anyone who suggests that NATO expansion could have been a contributing factor to the current Ukraine crisis, or that the sanctions imposed on Russia are not working and have backfired on a soon to be shivering Europe, or even that the US. Must prioritize avoiding a world war with a nuclear armed Russia, is denounced as a Putin stooge so let's take that. How would you respond to that? Well, first of all, you're really difficult. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking with the yval. Noah Harare. Yeval has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford, and he lectures at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he specializes in world history. His books have been translated into over 50 languages, and these books are Sapiens a Brief History of Humankind, Homo DEOs a Brief History of Tomorrow. And his new book, which we discuss today, is 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Yeval is rather like me in that he spends a lot of time worrying out loud. He's also a long term meditator. I don't know if there's a connection there. There was so much to talk about. There is much more in the new book than we touched, but we touched a lot. We actually started talking about the importance of meditation for his intellectual life. We talked about the primacy of stories, the need to revise our fundamental assumptions about human civilization and how it works, the current threats to liberal democracy, what a world without work might look like, universal basic income, the virtues of nationalism. You've all had some surprising views on that, the implications of AI and automation, and several other topics. So without further delay, I bring you, you all know, A Harare. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you to Rivers Cuomo. That's amazing. So you've heard this from me before, if you've been to an event or listened to events on a podcast. So it may get old to hear, but it really doesn't get old to say, I can't tell you what an honor it is to put a date on the calendar and have you all show up. I mean, it's just astonishing to me that this happens. Thank you. And thank you to you all for coming out. It's my own pleasant to collaborate with it. Thank you. So, Yval, you have these books that just steamroll over all other books. And I know because I write books. You wrote Sapiens, which is kind of about the deep history of a few fans, which is really about the history of humanity. And then you wrote Homo DEOs, which is about our far future. And now you've written this book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which is which is about the present. I can't be the only one in your publishing world who notices that. Now you have nothing left to write about. So good luck with that career of yours. How do you describe what you do because you're a historian? One thing that you and I have in common is that we have a reckless disregard for the boundaries between disciplines. You just touch so many things that are not straightforward history. How do you think about your intellectual career at this point? Well, my definition of history is that history is not the study of the past. It's the study of change, how things change. And yes, most of the time you look at change in the past, but in the end, all the people who lived in the past are dead, and they don't care what you write or say about them. If the past has anything to teach us, it should be relevant to the future and to the present also. But you touch biology and the implications of technology. I follow the questions, and the questions don't recognize these disciplinary boundaries. And as a historian, maybe the most important lesson that I've learned as a historian is that humans are animals. And if you don't take this very seriously into account, you can't understand history. Of course, I'm not a biologist. I also know that humans are a very special kind of animal. If you only know biology, you will not understand things like the rise of Christianity or the reformation of the Second World War. So you need to go beyond just the biological basis. But if you ignore this, you can't really understand anything. Yeah. The other thing we have in common, which gives you, to my eye, a very unique slant on all the topics you touch, is an interest in meditation and a sense that our experiences in meditation have changed the way we think about problems in the world. And questions like just what it means to live a good life, or even whether the question of the meaning of life is an intelligible one or a valid one or a one that needs to be asked, how do you view the influence of the contemplative life on your intellectual pursuits? I couldn't have written any of my books, either sapiens or Homodeo. So 21 lessons without the experience of meditation, partly because of just what I learned about the human mind, for observing the mind, but also partly because you need a lot of focus in order to be able to summarize the whole of history into, like, 400 pages. And meditation gives you this kind of ability to really focus. My understanding of at least the meditation that I practice is that the number one question is what is reality? What is really happening? To be able to tell the difference between the stories that the mind keeps generating about the world, about myself, about everything, and the actual reality. And this is what I try to do when I meditate, and this is also what I try to do when I write books to help me and other people understand what is the difference between fiction and reality. Yeah. And I want to get at that difference because you use these terms in slightly idiosyncratic ways. I think it's possible to either be confused about how you use terms like story and fiction, for instance, just the way you talk about the primacy of fiction, the primacy of story, the way in which our concepts that we think map onto reality don't really quite map onto reality, and yet they're nonetheless important. That is, in a way that you you don't often flag in your writing a real meditator's eye view of what's happening here. You're giving people the epiphany that certain things are made up. Like the concept of money, right? The idea that we have dirty paper in our pocket that is worth something, right? That is a convention that we've all agreed about. But it's an idea. It only works because we agree that it works. But the way you use the word story and fiction rather often seems to denigrate these things a little bit more than I'm tempted to do. When I talk about I don't say that there is anything wrong with it. Stories and fictions are a wonderful thing, especially if you want to get people to cooperate effectively. You cannot have a global trade of network unless you agree on money. And you cannot have people playing football or baseball or basketball or any other game unless you get them to agree on rules that quite obviously we invented. They did not come from heaven. They did not come from physics or biology. We invented them. And there is nothing wrong with people agreeing, accepting, let's say for 90 minutes, the story of football, the rules of football, that if you score a goal, then this is the goal of the whole game and so forth. The problem begins only when people forget that this is only a convention, this is only something we invented. And they start confusing it with kind of this is reality, this is the real thing. And in football it can lead to people to hooligans beating up each other or killing people because of this invented game. And on a higher level, it can lead to world wars and genocides in the name of fictional entities like gods and nations and currencies that we've created. Now, there is nothing wrong with these creations as long as they serve us instead of us serving them. But wouldn't you acknowledge that there's a distinction between good stories and bad stories? Yeah, certainly. The good stories are the ones that really serve us, that help people, that help other sentient beings live a better life. I mean, it's as simple as that. I mean, of course, in real life it's much more complicated to know what will be helpful and whatnot and so forth. But a good starting place is just to have this basic ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality, between our creations and what's really out there. Especially when, for example, you need to change the story of a story which was very adapted to one condition, is less adapted to a new condition which is, for example, what I think is happening now with the story. Of the underground liberal democracy, that it was probably one of the best stories ever created by humanity. And it was very adapted to the conditions of the 20th century. But it is less and less adapted to the new realities of the 21st century. And in order to kind of reinvent the system, we need to acknowledge that to some extent, it is based on stories we have invented. Right? But so when you talk about something like human rights being a story or a fiction that seems like a story or a fiction that shouldn't be on the table to be fundamentally revised, right? That's where people begin to worry that to describe these things as stories or fictions is to suggest tacitly, I don't think you do this explicitly, that all of this stuff is made up and therefore it's all sort of on the same level. And yet there's clearly a distinction between a distinction you make in your book between dogmatism and the other efforts we make to justify our stories. There are stories that are dogmatically asserted, and religion has more than a fair share of these, but there are political dogmas, there are tribal dogmas of all kinds. Nationalism can be anchored to dogma. And the mode of asserting a dogma is to be doing so without feeling responsible to counter arguments and demands for evidence and reasons why. Whereas with something like human rights, we can tell an additional story about why we value this convention. Right. It doesn't have to be a magical story. It doesn't have to be that we were all imbued by our creator with these things, but we can talk for a long time without saying it's just so to justify that convention. Yeah, human rights is a particularly problematic and also interesting case, first of all, because it's our story. I mean, we are very happy with you discrediting the stories of all kinds of religious fundamentalists and all kinds of tribes somewhere and ancient people, but not our story. Don't touch that. It depends what you mean by we, because I guess we most of the people. I don't see anybody here. It could be just empty chairs and recordings of laughter, but I assume that the people here, most of them, this is our story. The second thing is that we live in a moment when liberal democracy is is under a severe attack. And this was not so when I wrote Sapiens. I felt much clear writing these things back in 2011, 2012. And now it's much more problematic. And, yes, I find myself one of the difficulties of living right now as an intellectual, as a thinker, that you kind of I'm kind of torn apart by the imperative to explore the truth, to follow the truth wherever it leads me, and the political realities of the present moment and the need to engage in very important political battles. And this is one of the costs, I think, of what is happening now in the world, that it restricts our ability, our freedom, to truly go deep and explore the foundations of our system. And I still feel the importance of doing it, of questioning even the foundations of liberal democracy and of human rights simply because I think that as we have defined them since the 18th century, they are not going to survive the tests of the 21st century. It's extremely unfortunate that we have to engage on this two front battle, that at the same moment, we have to defend these ideas from people who look at them from the perspective of nostalgic fantasies, that they don't even they want to go back from the 18th century. And at the same time, we have to also go forward and think what it means, what the new scientific discoveries and technological developments of the 21st century really mean to the core ideas of what do human rights mean when you are starting to have superhumans? Do superhumans have superhuman rights? What does the right of freedom mean when we have now technologies that simply undermine the very concept of freedom when we created this whole system? Not we, somebody. Back in the 18th, they did back in the 18th and 19th century, we gave ourselves all kinds of philosophical discounts of not really going deeply enough in some of the key questions like, what do humans really need? And we settled for answers like, just follow your heart and this was good enough. This is Joseph Campbell. I blame Joseph Campbell. Follow your bliss? No, but follow your how the Voter knows best. The customer is always right. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. All these slogans, they were kind of covering up for not engaging more deeply with the question of what is really human freedom and what do humans really need? And for the last 200 years, it was good enough. But now to just follow your heart is becoming extremely dangerous and problematic when there are cooperations and organizations and governments out there that, for the first time in history, can hack your heart, and your heart might be now a government agent and you don't even know it. So telling people in 2018, just follow your heart, is a much more dangerous advice than in 70, 76. Yeah. So let's drill down on that circumstance. So we have this claim that liberal democracy is, one, under threat, and two, might not even be worth maintaining as we currently conceive it, given the technological changes that are upon us or will be upon us. No, it is worth maintaining. It's just becoming more and more difficult, given presumably, there are things about liberal democracy that are serious bugs and not features. In light of the fact that, as you say, if it's all a matter of putting everything to a vote. And we are all part of this massive psychological experiment where we're gaming ourselves with algorithms written by some people in this room to not only confuse us with respect to what's in our best interests, but the very tool we would use to decide what's worth wanting is being hijacked. It's one thing to be wrong about how to meet your goals. It's another thing to have the wrong goals and not even know that. It's hard to know where ground zero is for cognition and emotion if all of this is susceptible to outside influence, which ultimately we need to embrace because there is a possibility of influencing ourselves in ways that open vistas of well being and peaceful cooperation that we can't currently imagine right? Or we can't see how to get to. So it's not like we actually want to go back to when there was no, quote, hacking of the human mind. Every conversation is an attempted hack of somebody else's mind, right? So it's getting more subtle. Now, throughout history, other people and governments and churches and so forth, they all the time tried to hack you and to influence you and to manipulate you. They just weren't very good at it because humans are just so incredibly complicated. And therefore, for most of history, this idea that I have an inner arena which is completely free from external manipulation, nobody out there can really understand what's happening within me. How special you are and how special what I really feel and how I really think and all that it was largely true. And therefore the belief in the autonomous self and in free will and so forth, it made practical sense, even if it wasn't true on the level of ultimate reality. On a practical level, it was good enough. But however complicated the human entity is, we are now reaching a point when somebody out there can really hack it. Now, it can never be done perfectly. We are so complicated. I'm under no illusion that any corporation or government or organization can completely understand me. This is impossible. But the yardstick or the threshold, the critical threshold, is not perfect. Understanding the threshold is just better than me. The key inflection point in history, in the history of humanity, is the moment when an external system can reliably on a large scale, understand people better than they understand themselves. And this is not an impossible mission because so many people don't really understand themselves very well. No. Similarly with the whole idea of shifting authority from humans to algorithms. So I trust the algorithm to recommend TV shows for me and I trust the algorithm to tell me how to drive from Mountain View to this place this evening. And eventually I trust the algorithm to tell me what to study and where to work and whom to date and whom to marry and who to vote for. And then people say, no, that won't happen because there will be all kinds of mistakes and glitches and bugs, and the algorithm will never know everything, and it can't do it. And if the yardstick is the algorithm to trust the algorithm, to give authority to the algorithm, it needs to make perfect decisions, then yes, it will never happen. But that's not the yardstick. The algorithm just needs to make better decisions than me about what to study and where to live and so forth. And this is not so very difficult because as humans, we often tend to make terrible mistakes, even in the most important decisions in life. Yeah, I promise this will be uplifting at some point. So let's linger on the problem of the precariousness of liberal democracy. And there's so many aspects to this. Maybe just to add one thing to this precariousness, the ideas that systems have to change. Again, as a historian, this is obvious. I mean, you couldn't really have a functioning liberal democracy in the Middle Ages because you didn't have the necessary technology. Liberal democracy is not this eternal ideal that can be realized any time, any place. Take the Roman Empire in the third century. Take the Kingdom of France in the 12th century. Let's have a deliberate democracy there. No, you don't have the technology, you don't have the infrastructure. You don't have what it takes. It takes communication, it takes education. It takes a lot of things that you just don't have. And it's not just a bug of liberal democracy. It's true of any social, economic or political system. You could not build a communist regime in 16th century Russia. I mean, you can't have communism without trains and electricity and radio and so forth, because in order to make all the decisions centrally, if a slogan is that you work, they take everything and then they redistribute according to needs. Each one works according to their ability and gets according to their needs. The key problem there is really a problem of data processing. How do I know what everybody is producing? How do I know what everybody needs? And how do I shift the resources taking wheat from here and sending it there? In 16th century Russia, when you don't have trains, when you don't have radio, you just can't do it. So as technology changes, it's almost inevitable that the socioeconomic and political systems will change. So we can't just hold on. No, this must remain as it is. The question is, how do we make sure that the changes are for the better and not for the worse? Well, by that yardstick, now might be the moment to try communism in earnest. We can do it now, right? So you can all tweet that you've all know Harare is in favor of communism. I didn't say anything. I mean, we had a moment in the sun that seemed, however delusionally, to be kind of outside of history. The first moment in my life where I realized I was living in history was September 11, 2001. But before that, it just seemed like people could write books with titles like The End of History. And we sort of knew how this was going to pan out. It seemed liberal values were going to dominate the character of a global civilization. Ultimately, we were going to fuse our horizons with people of however disparate background. Someone in a village in Ethiopia was eventually going to get some version of the democratic liberal notion of human rights and the primacy of rationality and the utility of science. So religious fundamentalism was going to be held back and eventually pushed all the way back, and irrational economic dogmas that had proved that they're merely harmful would be pushback. And we would find an increasingly orderly and amicable collaboration among more and more people. And we would get to a place where war between nation states would be less and less likely, to the point where, by analogy, a war between states internal to a country like the United States, a war between Texas and Oklahoma just wouldn't make sense. Right. How is that possibly going to come about? Waiting to see. Yeah, exactly. But now we seem to be in a moment where much of what I just said we were taking for granted can't be taken for granted. There's a rise of populism. There's a xenophobic strand to our politics that is just immensely popular both in the US and in Western Europe. And this anachronistic nativist reaction, as you spell out in your most recent book, is being kindled by a totally understandable anxiety around technological change of the story. We're talking about people who are sensing it's not the only source of xenophobia and populism, but there are many people who are sensing the prospect of their own irrelevance. Given the dawn of this new technological age, what are you most concerned about in this present conference? I think irrelevance is going to be a very big problem. It already fuels much of what we see today with the rise of populism is the fear and the justified fear of irrelevance. If in the 20th century, the big struggle was against exploitation, then in the 21st century, for a lot of people around the world, the big struggle is likely to be against irrelevance. And this is a much more difficult struggle. A century ago, so you felt that at least you are the common person. There were all these elites that exploit me. Now you increasingly feel as a common person that there are all these elites that just don't need me. And that's much worse on many levels, both psychologically and politically, it's much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited. Spell that out. Why is it worse? First of all, because you're completely expendable. If a century ago you mount a revolution against exploitation, then you know that if things, when bad comes to worst, they can't shoot all of us because they need us. Who's going to work in the factories? Who's going to serve in the armies if they get rid of us? That's a motivational poster I'm going to get printed out. I'm not sure what the graphic is, but they can't shoot all of us if you're irrelevant. That's not the case. You're totally expendable. And again, we are often our vision of the future is followed by the recent past. The 19th and 20th century were the age of the masses, where the masses ruled, and even authoritarian regimes, they needed the masses. So you had these mass political movements like Nazism and like Communism and even somebody like Hitler or like Stalin. They invested a lot of resources in building schools and hospitals and having vaccinations for children and sewage systems and teaching people to read and write. Not because Hitler and Australian were such nice guys, but because they knew perfectly well that if they wanted, for example, Germany to be a strong nation with a strong army and a strong economy, they needed millions of people, common people, to serve as soldiers in the army and as workers in the factories and in the offices. So some people could be expendable and could be scapegoats like the Jews, but on the whole, you couldn't do it to everybody. You needed them. But in the 21st century, there is a serious danger that more and more people will become irrelevant and therefore also expendable. We already see it happening in the armies that whereas the leading armies of the 20th century relied on recruiting millions of common people to serve as common soldiers, today the most advanced armies, they rely on much smaller numbers of highly professional soldiers and increasingly unsophisticated and autonomous technology. If the same thing happens in the civilian economy, then we might see a similar split in civilian society, where you have a relatively small, very capable professional elite relying on very sophisticated technology. And most people, just as they are already today, militarily irrelevant, they could become economically and politically irrelevant. Now, that sounds like a real risk we're running, but the normal intuitions about what is scary about that don't hold up, given the right construal and expectations about human wellbeing. So it's like we know what people are capable of doing when they're irrelevant, because aristocrats have done that for centuries. There are people who have not had to work in every period of human history and they had a fine old time shooting pheasant and inventing weird board games. And then if you add to that, some more sophisticated way of finding well being. So if we taught people in the Stoic philosophy and how to meditate and good sports, and it's nowhere written that life is only meaningful if you are committed to something you only will do because someone's paying you to do it right. Definitely there is a worst case and a best case scenario. In the best case scenario, people are relieved of all the difficult, boring jobs that nobody really wants to do. But you do it because you need the money and you're relieved of that. And the enormous profits of the automation revolution are shared between everybody. And you can spend your time, your leisure time on exploring yourself, developing yourself, doing out or meditating or playing sports or developing communities. There are wonderful scenarios that can be realized. There are also some terrible scenarios that can be realized. I don't think there is anything inevitable. I mean, the technology, the technological revolution which is just beginning right now, it can go in completely different directions again. If you look back at the 20th century then you see that with the same technology of trains and electricity and radio, you can build a communist dictatorship or a fascist regime or a liberal democracy. The trains don't care. They don't tell you what to do with them and they can be used for anything. You can use them for they don't object. And it's the same way with AI and biotechnology and all the current technological inventions. We can use them to build really paradise or hell. The one thing that is certain is that we are going to become far more powerful than ever before, far more powerful than we are now. We are really going to acquire divine abilities of creation. In some sense even greater abilities than what was traditionally ascribed to most gods, from Zeus to Yahoo. If you look, for instance, the creation story in the Bible, the only things that Yahweh managed to create are organic entities. And we are now on the verge of creating the first inorganic entities after 4 billion years of evolution. So in this sense, we are even on the verge of outperforming the biblical God in creation. And we can do so many different things with that. Some of them can be extremely good, some of them can be extremely bad. This is why it's so important to have these kinds of conversations because this is maybe the most important question that we are facing. What to do with these powers? Yeah. What norms or stories or conventions or fictions, concepts, ideas, do you think stand in the way of us taking the right path here? I mean, to take we've sort of alluded to it without naming it. Let's say we could all agree that universal basic income was the near term remedy for some explosion of automation and irrelevance. You look skeptical about that. Yeah. I have two difficulties with universal basic income, which is universal and basic income is fine, but universal and basic, they are ill defined. Most people, when they speak about universal basic income, they actually have in mind national basic income. They think in terms, okay, we'll tax Google and Facebook in California and use that to pay unemployment benefits or to give free education to unemployed coal. Miners in Pennsylvania and unemployed taxi drivers in New York. The real problem is not going to be in New York. The real problem, the greatest problem is going to be in Mexico, in Honduras, in Bangladesh. And I don't see an American government taxing corporations in California and sending the money to Bangladesh to pay unemployment benefits there. And this is really the automation revolution they're clapping to stop us from paying those with the libertarians in the audience. We've built over the last few generations a global economy and a global trade network. And the automation revolution is likely to unravel the global trade network and hit the weakest links the hardest. So you will have enormous new wealth, enormous new wealth created here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. But you can have the economies of entire countries just collapse completely because what they know how to do, nobody needs that anymore. And we need a global solution for this. So universal, by universal you mean global taking money from California and sending it to Bangladesh, then yes, this can work. But if you mean national, it's not a real answer. And the second problem is with basic. How do you define what are the basic needs of human beings? Now in a scenario in which a significant proportion of people no longer have any jobs and they depend on this universal basic income of universal basic services, whatever they get, they can't go beyond that. This is the only thing they're going to get. Then who defines what is their basic needs? What is basic education? Is it just literacy or also coding or everything up to PhD or playing the violin? Who decides? And what is basic health care? Is it just I mean, if you're looking 50 years to the future and you see genetic engineering of your children and you see all kinds of treatments to extend life, is this the monopoly of a tiny elite or is this part of the universal basic package? And who decides? So it is a first step. The discussion we have now about universal basic income is an important first step. But we need to go much more deeply into understanding what we actually mean by universal and by basic. Right? So let's imagine that we begin to extend the circle coincident with this rise in affluence because on some level, if the technology is developed correctly, we are talking about pulling wealth out of the ether, right? So automation and artificial intelligence, that the pie is getting bigger. And then the question is how generously or wisely we will share it with the people who are becoming irrelevant because we don't need them for their labor anymore. Let's say we get better at that than we currently are. But you can imagine that we will be fast to realize that we need to take care of the people in our neighborhood in San Francisco and we will be slower to realize we need to take care of the people in Somalia. But maybe these lessons will be hard. One, we'll realize if we don't take care of the people in Somalia, a refugee crisis unlike any we've ever seen will will hit us in six months, right? So that, like, there'll be some completely self serving reason why we need to eradicate famine or some other largely economic problem elsewhere. But presumably we can be made to care more and more about everyone again, if only out of self interest. What are the primary impediments to our doing that? Human nature? It is possible. It's just very difficult. I think we need, for a number of reasons, to develop global identities, a global loyalty, a loyalty to the whole of humankind and to the whole of planet Earth. So this is a story that becomes so captivating that it supersedes other stories that seem to say Team America abolishes them. I don't think we need to abolish all nations and cultures and languages and just become this homogeneous grey gu all over the planet. No, you can have several identities and loyalties at the same time. People already do it. Now they had it throughout history. I can be loyal to my family, to my neighborhood, to my profession, to my city and to my nation at the same time. And some of them are conflicts, say, between my loyalty to my business and my loyalty to them, to my family. So I hate to think hard. Sometimes I prefer the interests of the family, sometimes I prefer the interests of the business. So that's life we have these difficulties in life. It's not always easy. So I'm not saying let's abolish all other identities and from now on we are just citizens of the world. But we can add this kind of layer of loyalty to their previous lures. And people have been talking about it for thousands of years, but now it really becomes a necessity because we are now facing three global problems which are the most important problems of humankind. And it should be obvious to everybody that they can only be solved on a global level through global cooperation. These are nuclear war. Climate change and technological disruption should be obvious to anybody that you can't solve climate change on a national level. You can't build a wall against rising temperatures or rising sea levels. No country, even in the United States or China, no country is ecologically independent. There are no longer independent countries in the world if you look at it from an ecological perspective. Similarly, when it comes to technological disruptions, the potential dangers of artificial intelligence and biotechnology should be obvious to everybody. You cannot regulate artificial intelligence on a national level. If there is some technological development you're afraid of, like developing autonomous weapons systems or like doing genetic engineering on human babies, then if you want to regulate this, you need cooperation with other countries. Because, like the ecology, also science and technology, they are, they are global. They don't belong to any one country or any one government. So if, for example, the United States bans genetic engineering on human beings, it won't prevent the Chinese or the Koreans or the Russians from doing it. And then a few years down the line, if the Chinese are starting to produce superhumans by the thousands, the Americans wouldn't like to stay behind, so they will break their own ban. The only way to prevent a very dangerous arms race in the fields of AI and biotechnology is through global cooperation. Now, it's going to be very difficult, but I don't think it's impossible. I actually gain a lot of hope from seeing the strength of nationalism. That's totally counterintuitive because everything you just said in the space provided, there's only one noun that solves the the problem, which is world government. On some level, we don't need a single emperor or government. You can have good cooperation even without a single emperor. Then we need some other tools by which to cooperate, because we have in a world that is as politically fragmented as ours, into nation states, all of which have their domestic political concerns and their short time horizons. So you're talking about global problems and long term problems that can only be solved through global cooperation and long term thinking. And we have political systems that are insular and focused on time horizons that don't exceed four or in the best case, six years. And then we have the occasional semi benevolent dictatorship that can play the game slightly differently. So what is the solution if not just a fusing of political apparatus at some point in the future? No, we certainly need to go beyond the national level, to a level when we have real trust between different countries of the kind. You see, for example, still in the European Union, if you take the example of having a ban on developing autonomous weapon systems. So if the Chinese and the Americans today try to sign an agreement banning killer robots, the big problem there is trust. How do you really trust the other side to live up to the agreement? AI is in distance much worse than nuclear weapons, because with nuclear weapons it's very difficult to develop nuclear weapons in complete secrecy. People are going to notice. But with AI there are all kinds of things you can do in secret. And the big question is how can we trust them? And at present there is no way that the Chinese and the Americans, for example, are really going to be able to trust one another. Even if they sign an agreement, every side will say, yes, we are good guys, we don't want to do it, but how can we really be sure that they are not doing it? So we have to do it first. But if you think about, for example, France and Germany, despite the terrible history of these two countries and much worse history than the history of the relations between China and in the US. If today the Germans come to the French and they tell us, and they tell the French, trust us. We don't have some secret laboratory in the Bavarian Alps where we develop killer robots in order to conquer France, the French will believe them, and the French have good reason to believe them. They are really trustworthy in this. And if the French and Germans manage to reach this situation, I think it's not hopeless. Also for the Chinese and the Americans, what explains that difference? Because it is a shocking fact of history that you can take these time slices that are 40, 50 years apart, where you have the attempted rise of the Thousand Year Reich, where Germany is the least trustworthy nation anyone could conceive of, the most power hungry, the most militaristic. You could say the same about Japan at that moment. And then fast forward a few decades and we have what? I guess it's always vulnerable to some change, but we have just a seemingly truly durable basis of trust. As a historian, what accomplished that magic? And why is it hard to just reverse engineer that with respect to Russia or China or any other adversary? A lot of hard work. In the case of the Germans, what you can say about them is there. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, brief housekeeping. Last week we ran an experiment with a live zoom call, which many of you seem to enjoy. I hear the chat was delightfully anarchic. I didn't see any of it myself. I was too busy zooming, but I'm told it ran off the rails in some ways, but to the amusement of many. And my surprise guest for that conversation was Glenn Lowry, who always makes sense. Thanks again to Glenn for taking the time. Anyway, that was fun, and I think we'll continue doing that periodically. And these conversations will not be released on any other platform. They're not going to be on YouTube, I don't think they'll live on my website. Part of the point for me is to have them be totally informal and ephemeral. So this is one of those situations where you're either there at the time or not, but that seems like the best use of the format. Okay, well, today I'm speaking with John Mcwharter. John is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He's also a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and he hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley. Anyway, as you'll hear, I'm quite excited to get John finally on my podcast, and he did not disappoint. The man is a fountain of good sense on the topic at hand, which is what he calls the new religion of anti racism in America, and we discuss many aspects of this topic. We talk about how conceptions of racism have changed over the years and now the ubiquitous threat of being branded a racist. We talk about the internal contradictions within identity politics. We talk about the strange willingness among progressives to lose the 2020 election. We discuss racism as the all purpose explanation for racial inequality in America, double standards for the black community, the war on drugs, the problem of police violence and our misconceptions about it, the enduring riddle of affirmative action, the politics of blackface, and other topics. Anyway, I really loved this conversation, and I think you might as well. And I bring you John Mcwharter. I am here finally with John McWhorter. John, thanks for coming. My pleasure. As you know, and I think other people know as well, there's been a standing invitation to have you on the podcast. I have long celebrated your contributions to our public conversation, but you have been a koi podcast guest. So we were just talking offline a moment ago. What finally changed your attitude toward doing this? Well, you know, it's really it's pretty mundane, I think, to an extent that would surprise some people. I am a very meat and potato sort of person. What I most enjoy doing is sitting in a chair and either reading a book or writing. And there's a part of me that always thinks that what I'm supposed to be is a writer. And I've been doing this for about 20 years now, this race commentary, and I've slowly seen that it's gotten to the point that you have to deal with the spoken word, that to really be part of the conversation, you can't just write anymore. You also have to talk. And I'm always a little bit behind when it comes to technological things in general, and also the fact that I really do, I am so happy to be here right now. But for me, writing is more fun than talking because you have more control over it. So for a very long time I've thought of podcasts, even though I do one of my own, as kind of the other thing. I figure my writing will stand in for me better than anything that I could say off the cuff. But I've come to realize that podcasts now occupy the place that writing did a long time ago, and that if I'm not going to do podcasts other than my own, then I might as well not be trying to communicate anything. So I'm trying to change my ways, and especially in the case of people like you who do this so well, but it's taken me a while. There's a part of me that really just wants to be sitting in a chair with my nose in a book. Yeah, well, I can certainly echo that in my case. I think I'm just a little bit ahead of you in having this epiphany. I mean, if the goal is to actually reach people and alter the currency of good and bad ideas, diminishing the latter, you just have to go where the minds are and we just reach so many more people this way. So this is great. I'm very happy to finally have you here. And one of the background facts to this conversation is you are, as a writer, working on a book that the world is truly waiting for. I don't know of another example in my lifetime of knowing someone is busily scribbling and knowing the truly oppressive need to take delivery of this manuscript out in the world. Is there any undue pressure on your side here just to give not to give more away than you want to in this conversation, but you are no, no. You're working on a book that is, I'm hoping and you've telegraphed a little bit on this point, will be the argument we're waiting for against what you've called the new religion of antiracism and how's it going and how's it feeling to be writing. As the flames of moral confusion crest the hills and begin descending upon our sleepy little hamlet, what a calendar year this is. I I don't think I've ever been asked how a book I was writing was going, but the truth of the matter is that I feel no pressure of anything. It's coming out as if it was driven by some kind of water pressure, like from a showerhead. I am on fire with this one, and I can barely keep ahead of the news in terms of what I'm writing about and why it upsets me and why I think people need to hear what I have to say. This one just came. I told my agent. I can't help it. I know there are going to be people who hate me for this, but I have got to write this one. It's going to come out of me. What are we going to do with it? And so, yeah, chapter five fell out of me last week, and that's the fifth of six chapters, and so I'm pretty much finished. And really, this book is just going to get across that this critical race theory infused way of looking at things where people who are like Mitt Romney are on top and everybody else is laboring on the bottom like slave orzman in some ship a very long time ago. And that our notion of identity has to be about defining ourselves against the white hegemon and the idea that we're supposed to go back to thinking of ourselves as stamped by what our racial membership is in exactly the way that old time Southerners wish that black people would. The whole dialogue is something that enlightened. People are going to have to learn how to stand down if we're not going to go over a certain precipice. And I try to get across in the book, and this is something that I hope people won't miss, that there's no point in viewing the people who I'm calling the elect. You might call them the wokesters, et cetera. For me, it's the elect, because they do think of themselves as elect. In that way, it doesn't make any sense to see them as monsters. To say that they're coming for your kids, which they are, but to say that they're coming for your kids is not to imply that they're trying to do some kind of harm, that they have frowns on their faces. They really do think of themselves as ahead of the curve. They think of themselves as bringing a kind of good news, and that's for the capital G and a capital N to the world and they can't be reasoned with, is important. We have to realize that there's no point in trying to have conversations with people of those politics, of that philosophy along the lines of saying that they need to understand that we should enshrine free speech. There's no point in saying to them, why can't you be open to other opinions? That makes as much sense as trying to teach a fundamentalist Christian that they shouldn't have faith in Jesus, literally. And I don't mean that rhetorically. There is no point in engaging with people of these kinds of politics. What we have to do is work around them so that we can go on foraging progressivism of the kind that we thought could bear fruit. And what that means, and this is the final chapter, and it's going to actually be the toughest one, because I want it to be constructive rather than destructive, is that we've got to learn how to stand up to these people and say no. And it can't only be the occasional weird person like you or me who doesn't mind an argument and for some reason doesn't mind when people yell at them. Everybody's going to have to learn that you stand up to this sort of person. You tell them that you are not going to agree with them, and that includes that you do not think of yourself as, for example, a racist. And then this is something that it is going to be a major adjustment. And, goodness, we've had to make a lot of adjustments this year. But I think it's important that people learn how to make an adjustment, which is that they're going to get called a white supremacist, for example. You're going to get called a dirty name by a person who's usually educated and or very articulate, and they're going to call it to you loudly, they're going to say it again, and they're going to spread it on Twitter. We have to realize that that can happen without the sky falling in. And I'm gathering examples of people who actually have the nerve to stand up to it, who keep their jobs, who watch progressivism continuing to happen. Because if we don't do this, we're going to see our institutions taken over by this perversion of what progressivism is, by people who genuinely think of themselves as doing good. But we can't be scared of being called a racist to such an extent that we let all of this utterly misguided, under thought out, manipulative nonsense shape what we thought of as intellectual, the arts and moral philosophy. Yeah, well, I should remind people of your background as a linguist, because it's relevant here, because this trend we are opposing in so many cases seems to have language on its side, right? And I can only imagine that you, as a linguist, must be amazed at some of the clever, if not albeit cynical, moves made with language here and the kinds of people who get taken in by them. So there's a few examples I have in my head. Here one recently on Twitter. You may have noticed that Joyce Carol Oates, the quite famous, accomplished well regarded fiction writer, lacking any irony or self awareness, wrote on Twitter the other day that antifa means antifascist, right? So there could be nothing wrong with this group simply because of how they had branded themselves. And I think there you and Steve Pinker should probably show up at her house for foreign interventions. That's just amazing to see. But even more widespread is the effectiveness of the branding of Black Lives Matter, right? As though it has the exact same pretense of being morally unassailable, and everyone seems to be taken in by it. To say any word of criticism about Black Lives Matter as an organization or as a movement or with respect to its tactics or extreme positions held by some of its loosely affiliated members, to utter anything other than mere ascent to the branding is to be on the back foot trying to argue that you're not racist. And it's very clever and really insidious. What has been your linguistic ride through this morass in the last few months? Well, I wish that I could talk about dynamic and frightening synergy between the use of language and the ideology here in question. But to tell you the truth, I think that a lot of it really is just a matter of what people's ideas are now. To an extent, people are seduced into thinking these are valid notions because of large, often Latin eight words. Intersectionality is a pretty cool word. If you don't want to say tear things down or if you want to feel like you're doing something constructive by teaching people to walk around feeling guilty about their privilege, then saying dismantling structures is satisfying. I don't think it's even cynical. I think it's satisfying because dismantle and structure are biggest words, and they've got a certain crispness in them. So you can say dismantling structures, and that kind of holds a lot of people off because you are and this is the main thing I don't think it's so much language. It's that people are afraid. We have gotten to this weird point. It's it's very interesting. Starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 80s, we have this massive psychosocial revolution in this country, unprecedented in the history of the human species. And that is that the typical person comes to think of it as a horrible thing to be called a racist practically like being called a pedophile. That's progress. It doesn't mean that their minds are completely swept of all possible racist feelings. But that was new. And it's at the point where people, even under 50, are beginning to forget how new that was. Forget if you're under 30, but that was new. But once you've got everybody in that place, now here comes something a few beats later where what it threatens you with is you being tarred as a racist in public. That wouldn't have been processed as such a threat in even 1980. A lot of people would have just said, basically if you think I'm a racist, fuck you. And we think of that person when we look back and we think of them as callous, and they would have been, but now ordinary people, the ordinary good person, is so scared that they will do things that they don't mean, they will say things that they don't believe. And so one of them is that you don't say anything about what can be put under that umbrella of Black Lives Matter. And it's not necessarily that people don't in some part of their mind understand that a lot of this stuff doesn't make any sense, but they're afraid. They're afraid of being called a name. They would rather avoid being called a name than make sociopolitical sense. And part of why it gets up my nose, as Mrs. Slocom used to say in Are You Being Served? The British Sitcom. Part of what gets up my nose is that it's condescending. What any white person who is paying court to this sort of thing is doing is saying black people don't have to make sense. It seems like black minds don't matter. So I will say anything that I need to say to keep these people from embarrassing me in public and making me feel bad about myself. And if it doesn't make any sense, well, black people kind of don't, do they? I'll bet some people in their bedrooms are saying that when black people can't hear. And yet we're not supposed to talk about that either. So it's all very disturbing. But I don't think and Sam, we may differ on this, we may not. I don't think it's cynical. I think very few of these people are thinking to themselves, we are going to take power and we're going to do it by manipulating language and by playing with people's minds. I think these people are quite sincere and that's what makes it harder. It's almost harder to have to hurt somebody's feelings when they genuinely think that they're giving you a present. But unfortunately, the people in this case who think they're giving us a present, some of them are very naive. I think more of them are, if they're white, they're hell bent on feeling good about themselves as not racist and they'll let that trump sense. If you're a black person who subscribes to this sort of thing, you have been tricked by this sort of person. And a lot that was going on going on before into thinking that what makes you significant and what makes you special is your victim status rather than you as yourself. That's understandable, given black people's history, that you might need to reach a little further than some people to find a sense of well being and significance and security. It's completely understandable. But that means in this case that a lot of people think that the most interesting thing about themselves is what they suffer in terms of what people who aren't them are. Or maybe aren't thinking, that's not a healthy self identity. So all of this is just a complete mess. But no one is malevolent in these cases. We're not dealing with cynics. We're dealing with people who are tragically misled. That's really interesting. I think, on the cynicism point, maybe I'm putting the line between good and bad faith at a slightly different point. I want to plunge into a conversation about racism here and what it means as a term, what it should mean, and just how the mission creep of the concept is causing a lot of suffering to step back for a second. The reason why I want to talk about this is I'm really worried about this trend. We're speaking about the capture of our institutions and our language by this, I would say cultic behavior. I referred to it as a cult of wokeness. You're talking about the very much the new religion of antiracism. There's a there's a kind of moral extortion going on and a Stockholm syndrome. And, I mean, all of these, you know, analogies seem apt, and I'm worried about it for two reasons. One, I'm worried in the near term that it will be the thing that gets Trump reelected, and I put myself in second position to I think no one in my desire to see Trump's political career ended in November. I think it'd be nice. I really do think that this will be why we get four more years of the orange goblin in the White House. But beyond that and a much longer term concern is that I think it is doing and will do damage to race relations in this country, and it will do precisely the damage that I think it's pretending to expose in many cases. And the analogy that came to mind recently, I was on someone else's podcast, and I just wound up blurting this out. But I think I stand by it. What I feel like is happening over the course of many months is analogous to what happened, you know, on a single ghastly afternoon when the O. J. Verdict was delivered. Right. When you saw, you saw, you know, those of us who are, you know, old enough remember this, as I assume you do, we saw on split screen on every television in the country, we saw these opposing reactions to a single moment. And to see when white America obviously there were exceptions in both camps, no doubt. But the general experience was of white America seeing black America erupt in jubilation over this verdict. And this is why I use the term cynical here, because it's not that you can't explain that reaction in terms of all the terrible inequality and grievance that has preceded it. Right. We have the history of white and black America to explain that moment. But within the frame of that trial and that verdict and that moment, there was something cynical about it because I think it was widely understood, if not universally understood that he was obviously guilty, right? But everyone knew it and everyone knew that everyone else knew it. And so there was no sense that all of these black faces that were tearful in joy over the outcome here thought that this man hadn't nearly decapitated his wife and a stranger, right? They were playing a very different game that had nothing to do with truth or justice in this case, or putting an actual murderer behind bars or setting an innocent man free. And so that's where maybe cynicism isn't the right rubric here, but it's a lack of purchase on what is true that I think is so awful here. And again, the analogy has to change a little bit to COVID the phenomenon we're talking about now. But it's the dishonesty and bad faith, the notion that you need to break a lot of eggs to make this equity omelet. And so, yeah, there's a lot of people who we know really aren't racist who are going to go down for this because this is the way we have to play our political game. That's the kind of thing that is so toxic. And so anyway, I put that to you as an analogy. But I mean, that that's the I feel like that the spirit of that dissociation from honest conversation about facts. I mean, so I guess I guess the the frame here would be there's something like a default position now in polite society at the New York Times, in universities, in corporations that every disparity, every significant disparity we're seeing between white and black America, whether it's violent crime or educational outcomes or employment, how many Fortune 500 CEOs are of whatever skin color? The only way to explain those disparities is either white racism or institutional racism or systemic racism. And nothing else need to be thought about. And to think about anything else is to essentially volunteer to be cast as yet another racist who doesn't get it or yet another troglodyte, another Archie Bunker character who doesn't get it. And there's a commensurate just attempt to deprogram our whole society along those lines. And then we have this cast of characters like Ibrahimax Kendi and Rob DeAngelo spreading really the doctrine of a new religion to people who are avid to pay for it. That's where I'm placing the cynicism in this movement. Yeah, I see what you mean and you touch on very important points. One of them is something that you see that can be really confounding, which is that the central members of this elect group are willing to hold on to this ideology even if it means losing elections. And that's one of many things that shows that this isn't about politics, this isn't about dismantling structures. This is mainly it's a religious creed. We are like Romans watching the birth of Christianity. I genuinely think within my lifetime I have watched a really influential new religion in formation. Isn't it in its way interesting. And that's why. So, for example, Mark Lilla's book from a few years ago where he said that we need to tamp down identity politics with the purpose of getting this moron out of office, that a certain kind of person basically circled the wagons and called him all kinds of names, including white supremacists, because he wasn't with the gospel. And it's the same way now where what is most important is to talk about institutional racism and call the requisite people white supremacists and to really annoy as many people as possible, regardless of whether it could mean that we have another four years of that narcissistic insusion simpleton as the person running this country. They really have a different sense of ranking than anybody would, except if it was a religion. And what you're talking about otherwise comes down to what really is the keystone problem of the whole way that we're being urged to see the race problem. And that is this idea that any problem that black people have, any kind of lag, is due to racism. And it's partly you talk about language partly because of the way the use of the term racism has drifted. I don't think anybody was pulling the term along in order to throw up some kind of smokescreen. But racism starts as Archie Bunker and his personal bigotry. And then starting in the 1960s, it comes to refer not to active racism but to results of racist behavior or even just racism, meaning that black people are behind in some way such that you can say that the society is racist in that disparity by analogy with what racism originally was. And so it ends up being a very muddy term. Language tends to be muddy. But our new idea is indeed what you're mentioning that, say, Ibrahim Kendi or Rob and DeAngelo say, which is that if black people lag behind, then it's racist. And with Kendi in particular, you can feel him holding back the indignation because he really feels that if this isn't perfectly obvious, then I don't know what isn't. And the fact that I have to write a book saying this, or two books saying this is an indication of the racism in question. Although, of course, now we're getting into this extremely protein sense of what racism is. But the problem with all of this is that the racism in cases like this, whatever we want the term to mean, gets to be so abstract, so difficult to perceive, that if it is racism we're talking about such. A Rube Goldberg game of mousetrap that there's no way that you could meaningfully convince any dominant segment of any public of normal people that this made sense. And so, for example, every summer the number of teenage and 20 something black boys in distressed communities who are killing each other goes way up. And we haven't wanted to talk about it. But that's then, including in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. We've been talking about George Floyd and lately various other men who have suffered really grisly fates at the hands of the cops. And in the meantime, black men have been killing each other with abandon in city after city across the United States, as happens every summer. Now, that is a tragedy. It has nothing to do with any kind of inherent depravity of the boys and men in question. But tell me how it's about racism. And if you're going to call it being about racism, if you're going to talk about not having fathers, if you're going to talk about the fact that the war on drugs was created partly with black criminals in mind, 50 years ago. All of that is so indirect at this point that to just hold your hands out and say that the reason they're doing that is racism in the way that, for example, a kendy would. It's just a vast oversimplification. Once again, white people are being told that it's okay to pretend that when race issues come up, you let your IQ go down about 50 points because apparently black people's IQs are just stuck there. And so it won't work. I can understand a lot of people's good intentions here, to be honest. I don't think that Kendi or DeAngelo quite understand the matter beyond this. I think, to put it most politely, I think neither one of them quite understand that these issues would be worth a kind of sustained sort of engagement. They don't realize how complex these things are, apparently, because although they wouldn't use the word, they're under the influence of a religion. How complicated is the Bible supposed to be beyond the world of theologians? But they're not thinking about it all that hard. But this is the proposition that will never work. Irish people, Jewish people, there are certain people listening to me now who are just sitting at the edge of their seats waiting to say, but they were white. Hold on, folks. I've heard it before. Think about it. Have I not heard that before? Let me make the point. There were Irish people, they were Jewish people, they were Italian people, and they used to practically be thought of as black. And, well, they became white, and they did it without there being any grand psychosocial revolution in society. Now, the idea has always been, well, it wasn't fair to expect black people to do that. And you know what? Maybe it wasn't. And that's why we had a civil rights revolution that gave us a real boost. And nobody can deny that we did get a real boost in the early 70s. There are all sorts of things in place that allow that. So we get that real boost and there's a further psychosocial revolution in terms of how the country thinks about racism. But the idea is somehow that it's only going to go that far because since we're brown, the prejudice against us. Is stronger. And therefore this is what white people who are on the fence and I think white people even who wouldn't call themselves on the fence, but deep down when they're having a drink, think about is that black people are always waiting for the rules to be different. For us, there's this idea that everybody else just had to claw their way, and that with black people, even though there was a civil rights revolution, still not enough in our case, the rules have to be different. Now we have people with lots of letters after their names who can put that sort of thing in very elegant language. I don't think they're doing it on purpose, but the intersectionality is one way of doing it. People like Ibrahim Kendi's idea that we recast what we think of as intelligence and make it things like, quote unquote desire to know that's from one of his books. The whole notion that we recast what we think of as talent, the idea that we're going to reform the subject of stem and change how we think of physics, et cetera, that mathematics is racist, all of this stuff, what all of this translates into is for black people, the rules have to be different. And, you know, people are sick of it, and it's at the point where it's understandable that they will be. This whole new ideology is based on an idea that we're going to teach a significant number of people in the United States to have so creative, so transformative a view of how human affairs could go in this great nation, that change could actually happen. And you know, it's not going to. Part of the reason that I find all of this so disturbing is because they're poor black people who need real help and people who consider themselves to be speaking for them are sitting around in rooms putting their hands up in the air and saying they understand their white privilege. And teaching black people to think that their main role in society is to be the people who they should be grateful that white people consider themselves privileged over. And now we have people who are trying to teach this to our children, sometimes with actual books. And in the meantime, Donald Trump gets reelected and somehow all of this is progressivism. I seriously doubt it, but I say again, these people don't know what they're doing. They're not mean. They think that they're giving us the good news. They're like Mormons. But we just have to realize that those smiles on their faces are deceptive and we can't let them win. Well, it really is a complex picture, but there are so many ways to notice that its complexity has to exceed at every point the simple diagnosis that it's white racism or systemic racism that is not yet fully rectified because white people simply don't care enough about it. That explains all of these problems because just two things that occurred to me as I was listening to you. When you think about the variable of race and you, you notice that there are some communities, like African immigrants, Nigerian immigrants, who succeed disproportionately per capita in our society. They're among the most successful people in our society. White racism should be cutting against them in the same way. Right? So really, if it were that pernicious, if we just had racists in all these companies in Silicon Valley who just don't want black people in the office, it would show up there too. And this is a point that Coleman Hughes has made in various contexts. I was just thinking of him. And then there's also the fact that if you take the problem of violence that you referenced in a city like Chicago that you really can set your watch by and you can know the color of people's skin in advance. I mean, this is what's so depressing, right? If you tell me that 30 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago, I could make money all day betting that they were non white. Sad. Sadly, yes. So to obfuscate that fact is, as virtually everyone left of center is inclined to do at this moment, is really kind of sanity straining and totally unproductive. But when you ask what a non racist who would want nothing more than to solve that problem could do to solve it, right? If we could just, with all of our goodwill of non racism or antiracism come in there and fix the problem, what would that solution look like? Whatever the solution is, it's not a matter of just making sure that everyone within 1000 miles of Chicago is no longer racist, right? We have a cultural problem there that is being expressed, that needs some remedy and people need to be given somehow a totally different aspiration that has something to do with getting educated and something to do with integrating in polite society. It's just hard to see how even someone like Kendi can think that. That's the full story. It's an interesting thing and I'm glad you brought up Nigerians because there's a little bit more to the story that I was mentioning, which was that it used to be said that well, white people are only going to let black people get so far. Then after about 90 90 we started having a high level of African immigrants to this country, not to mention Caribbean ones who've been coming before. And it's become painfully clear that these are people who are often subject to exactly the same kinds of racism. It's not that racism doesn't exist, but they thrive. They make the best of the least. Now, people who speak for black people, black ones and fellow travelers have a standing response to that, which is that those people have what's called immigrant pluck and it's not fair to expect native born black people to have it. And one answer to that question is why what group in the history of the human species has ever had a motto of, yes, we can't? That's what that is. The idea is that you're supposed to be proud of saying, no, we can't be expected to have that kind of pluck. What that is, is self hating. And it's interesting because there's a grand old tradition of calling someone like me self hating. Apparently I lack confidence. Apparently I wish I were white. Well, you know what? I'm afraid not. And the truth is that from behind my eyes, I see people who are willing to settle for this weak vision of what black people are supposed to be as the ones who don't like themselves inside, which is part of why I almost never get really angry at them. I think to myself, if you don't like yourself, then of course you're going to settle for this, and of course you're going to get mad if somebody like me who does comes along and says that you need to buck up. I understand that anger, but yeah, the other problem is that we're not allowed to talk about that all human groups have negative cultural traits, and that being a descendant of African slaves at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st doesn't somehow make that untrue. And so instead of talking about the cultural problem, there's this assumption that you're saying that there's something biologically depraved about black people and you must have your wrist smacked about that. But yes, the question becomes, what racism would you withdraw to solve a problem? And so, for example, a lot of why black guys are killing each other in cities is based on things that trace back often maybe two or three steps, but trace back to the war on drugs. So one solution might be to fight tooth and nail against that ridiculous war on drugs, because its effect would be when you withdrew that, that things in the inner city would be quite different because there would be no drug turf to fight over. There would be no tempting black market if you went to a lousy school and had a lousy life to use to keep the wolf from the door. If there were no way of making half a living selling drugs. And notice, folks, I said half a living. I know the factoid that none of them get rich except the occasional person, but still, it keeps the wolf from the door. If that weren't possible, then the same men would go find legal work and claw their way up from the bottom. And it's not fair that they have to, but that would be better than getting killed or going to prison for a very long time and leaving children to recapitulate their lives because their dads weren't there. Let's face it, it would be better. But you don't talk about that too much. Now, many of the people will say, well, yes, we need to talk about that too. But why is it that their favorite topic is just to get rid of quote unquote, racism? With the idea that protesters about what happened to George Floyd actually putting their bodies on the ground, white protesters, and bowing down to black people standing up there above them is somehow more important or is even a necessary preliminary? All of this energy that people are putting into, for example, putting out statements that their organization is going to fight white supremacy and the organization is like a school of nursing. The organization is a school of music theory. It's a math department. All of these profoundly racist places. Why is any of that necessary when really all that energy could go into getting rid of a war on drugs that would solve probably about 65% of the problems that most AIL us? You don't talk about it because we're talking about a religion. It's not because the people are dumb. It's not because they're crazy. It's not because they're mean. And not to push this too hard. I don't think it's that they're cynics. It's that they are pious. They have taken on a way of thinking that means that you sequester a part of your brain for thoughts and responses that are not based on logic. And we can't say that that's crazy because most of the world's human beings are religious. Yeah, I totally follow you there. I tend to think of it as a cult, but, you know, the the difference between a cult and a religion is numbers of subscribers. So it's, you know, as it grows, it certainly could have the shape of a new religion. Let's talk about how to move forward. Just what would a sane path through the wilderness look like and how we should think about identity and just what the goal is. In my mind, the goal is something like a colorblind society, so that to truly overcome racism would not be to arrive in some future where more and more of us are passionate antiracists. It would be to arrive in a future where we could never dream, really that skin color could have moral or political significance, right? Just as is the case with hair color today, no one is trying to figure out how many blondes or brunettes or redheads are in various positions in society. And for good reason. Nobody cares. And if we perversely started caring about that right, and started advertising our grievances with respect to hair color, we would have taken a significant step away from basic human sanity. And so we have to recover sanity somehow with this variable of race. Just to give a little context, anyone who's been listening to my podcast for a while knows that and who knows anything about my views, about the nature of the mind and the nature of the self knows that I don't think a person should, even at the end of the day, identify with the face that he or she sees in the mirror each day. That is not the proper locus of one's self concept. But how much less should one identify with a group of people, most of whom will be strangers forever, who just happen to superficially resemble the face you see in the mirror each day. It just seems completely nuts to think of oneself in those terms in any kind of ongoing way. And the idea that I would spend any part of today thinking about my whiteness or feeling solidarity with other white people because we share some skin tone in the midst of my life that would be synonymous with me suffering some kind of brain damage. It would be a kind of illness of the mind. And yet what is being advertised to us from all quarters is that group identity. And again, this within the wokeness. This extends beyond race. This covers sexuality and gender and other variables. But there's a primacy of group identity that is apparently there's no vision any longer of getting beyond. Right. But as much as I want to get beyond it, that's not to say that I believe I am colorblind now. Right. Because that is actually it strikes me as impossible as long as one is aware of statistics. So, for instance, what I just said about being able to predict who is committing all of these crimes in Chicago, the fact that I know these background facts about just the identities of people who are committing robberies and other violent crimes gives me a certain expectation. I mean, I'm very surprised to hear it when it turns out to be a Hasidic Jew and not at all surprised when I hear it's yet another black man who's guilty of, you know, whatever the crime is. And so it's just that that sort of background expectation which violates any principle of of color blindness now. And I guess the the flip side of it for me, I mean, recently I remember I was watching one of these SpaceX launches, and when they went to the press conference, side of things, one of the people on the panel was a black woman who was one of the rocket scientists. You know, she was an engineer of some kind. So, you know, the reality of that situation for me is, you know, I'm watching that. And it it made me inordinately happy to see a black woman rocket scientist. And so and and the only way to understand that, you know, psychological change in me is two things are going on. One is I have some though I never thought about it up until that moment, I had some background statistical belief that it was fairly uncommon for a black person, much less a black woman, to be a rocket scientist. But in addition to that, there's a deeply positive, albeit not at all colorblind emotion, which is I'm overjoyed to see a black woman rocket scientist. I want there to be more black women in those roles. And conversely, I want there to be fewer black men in the role of yet another booked suspect for a robbery or a homicide in a major American city. So just the mere awareness of the statistics kind of overrides any aspiration for being truly colorblind at moments like these. But that failure of colorblindness cannot be the same thing as racism. Right. Because what I want is all of these good outcomes and more good outcomes and fewer bad outcomes for black people in either case. And beyond all of that, what I want more than anything is to get to a society where I wouldn't even be tempted to notice the color of a person's skin, whether they're a rocket scientist or a criminal. Right. Because it would make no sense to notice it because I didn't notice their hair color either. Right. The question is, how do we get there? But it does strike me that there's this transitional period where color blindness isn't quite the prescription. And I guess the question of affirmative action lands right in here. What is the right policy to be implementing, given that? I think the goal really is to get beyond any kind of politics of identity in the end, yeah, that's what we were supposed to want. And that's become unfashionable. And there are reasons for it. It's interesting if you could go into a graduate seminar in a humanities department on just about any subject, and you could hook up wires to every student after they had signed a certain protocol, making sure that everything's okay, knowing that nothing unpleasant was going to happen to them. Put some wires on everybody EKG or something like that. And then just get up in front of the class and say Identity. And you could watch people's blood pressure go up a little bit, and you could probably measure, if you did a quick blood test endorphins going through their veins. There's this notion that what it really has to be about is identity. And what I mean by that is that these days we're taught that the enlightened black person centers their sense of self on their relationship to what white people are doing or not doing. And so what exactly is your identity? And your identity has to be caught up in this idea of not being white and also being in eternal complaint about what white people are doing or not doing. That is considered the advanced thing that is higher reasoning. That is the equivalent in this religion to having faith in Jesus. And so if that's what you're doing, then the idea that we're going to get past race is inconvenient. Because for that kind of person, and unfortunately, that kind of person is common for that kind of person, if you're not thinking of yourself as colored, so to speak, you don't have anywhere to grab on to. To even think of the idea of a colorblind America is to imagine an America in which you cannot imagine just where you would fit in. What we're dealing with is ultimately what happens to Homo sapiens when groups get larger than about 150 people, where nobody has to wonder what they are. With white elect, in this case, a lot of it is that you want to have a sense of purpose. And if it can't be that you're just somebody's brother and somebody's son and you marry somebody and all of you go out and you hunt whales or something like that, you don't have any existential crisis. Once you're in a large modern society, you want to have a sense of what you are good for, what's your purpose. It can be hard to find that it is not natural to wish to be an individual and yet that is what modernity forces upon us. So one thing that you can be is this crusader where you're battling racism. But that means, especially with the way it's being put these days, that you must think of yourself as this evil white person who's always going to be racist no matter how many good things you do for black people. And you feel good about being able to say that about yourself. If you couldn't say it, then who exactly are you? And it's wrong to suppose that any of these people on either side, the white side or the black side. And of course, that's a vast oversimplification. But it's not that anybody's trying to make money. It's not that anybody's trying to have power. If anything, it's part of the self definition of the elect to think of themselves as not having power. It's what makes you feel like a person. And so what we have is a situation where here is the black female rocket scientist and I'm sure that the typical elect person applauds that in a kind of perfunctory way. But what they want is for it to be made easier for black people to become rocket scientists by getting rid of all of the really tough math. And I'm not exaggerating. You can actually hear people saying these sorts of things as I have walking next to them. You can read people saying things like this. There are tenured and hot shot black professors who stand up in front of august bodies of people saying that it's racist to expect black scholars to be mathematically competent. And I'm not exaggerating. And so the idea is that if we're going to have a colorblind society, it's going to have to be one where how we do rocket science is changed or that you can become a rocket scientist without learning a lot of the things that, until now, it's been thought of as absolutely necessary and even defining for a rocket scientist to know. And that's really dangerous stuff, again, partly because it's horrifically condescending. If the idea were that you could be a rocket scientist by not doing the things that rocket scientists are supposed to do. Everybody would know the ones that had not done the things that you're supposed to do, and everybody would be reinforced and thinking there was something wrong with black people, which the elect wouldn't mind. It's not that they're going for it, but they wouldn't mind because that would give them further fuel for talking about how indelibly racist society is. But, yes, ultimately we want to get past these distinctions. And yet my friend Thomas Chatterton Williams, whenever he tries to talk about how we need to start moving back towards the colorblindness that we see people in black and white newsreels singing of, well, he gets roasted as some kind of Uncle Tom or he's a white supremacist. And of course, Sam, we have to talk about the fact that for a lot of people, the instant answer here is the cops. So for many people, the idea is that, for example, my identity must be focused on how I am not white because of what happened to George Floyd. Now, the problem there is that with OJ. I had a whole kind of buildings roman about that. I was disgusted watching those black students on TV cheering when it was painfully obvious what OJ. Simpson had done. It took me a while to fully get that, yes, everybody knew what he did. It was painfully obvious. And I couldn't stand listening to people pretend not to know at the time because I like to have all the ducks in a row. But it was seen as a vigilante justice against a genuine terrorism that the La. Cops had exerted against particularly black people in Los Angeles. And there was a similar feeling across the United States for reasons which statistically made sense then. And even if they didn't make sense exactly in 1997, people's sense of how the world works for them is not going to change instantly because of gradual sea changes over time. So nowadays. I see that the OJ Simpson performance art had a certain understandability. It disappointed me a lot in my first book about race losing the race. I'm still white hot about people's willful refusal to understand the real facts on that case. Now I kind of get it, but, goodness, it's been a while. OJ. Was that 1994? So here we are 26 years later. There are people who weren't born then who have two or three kids and real jobs. It was a very long time ago. And at this point, we're in one of the most challenging situations that I have ever known in terms of how we move forward, which is that if you look at the statistics, it is quite clear that the idea that cops even subconsciously kill black people out of racist animus or even subtle racist bias is simply insupportable. It just doesn't work. And I was somebody who thought that that was true until about four years ago. And I was in a conversation with my sparring partner, Brown university economist and black man Glenn Lowry, where he and I were arguing about this. And I said, Glenn, you'd have to prove to me that this sort of thing happens to white people. And not only does it happen to white people, but there are further arguments that make it clear that even if black men are killed disproportionately to their numbers, then unfortunate facts about who commits the most crimes, including homicides. Not to mention just factoring poverty and how that affects interactions with cops, whether you're white, Latino, or black, makes it clear that the simple idea that's so intuitive that George Floyd died because of the color of his skin simply doesn't go through. And yet, Sam, what does worry me is that we are at a point where, because of the religion and its imperatives, you can't get that across to a critical mass of people. I have watched people much smarter than me presented with the very simple facts who simply can't hear them. And these are people who are usually rather even temple people who get upset. This really presses a button. And so, unfortunately, a lot of the people who identify as X, Y or Z and seem to be going directly against what Martin Luther King was calling for would say that they're doing it because the cops killed George Floyd because he was black. And that kind of thing keeps happening. And as long as that's what they know, and as long as they won't listen to what the truth is about black men and the cops, which is that the cops are a serious problem in this country, but that when it comes to who they kill, the data simply doesn't support that black men are being killed because cops are racist against them. We can't really get anywhere. That's the hardest thing about this, the cops. Interesting. Yeah. So, as most people listening will recall, I did a podcast in the immediate aftermath of the George Floyd killing. I believe it was titled Can We Pull Back From the Brink? Which was a solo podcast. As I said at the time, I consciously resisted the impulse to bring on someone like yourself to sort of to midwife that conversation, because I just felt like the idea that I couldn't say what I thought needed to be said on my own as a white guy was pernicious and worth not capitulating to. So I did it solo and got a lot of support and also a lot of criticism. And people can't shake the feeling that a white person shouldn't be saying these things very much along the lines of what you just said. I know you read the transcript of that podcast. I'm wondering, is there anything you think I got wrong? Or is there any place, is there any daylight between us on this issue? Sam, the honest truth is what you said on that podcast was all spun gold as far as I'm concerned, in terms of bravery. I was struck by your mentioning something that even I have hesitated to ever say anything about because of the nature of the situation, which is that really, you know, if the cops, you know, grab you and they want you to do something, you need to let them do it. The idea that you're being some kind of hero to resist that you're supposed to think about the cosmic sociopolitics and kind of flip the bird at the cops or do worse, and that that ends up creating a lot of these problems, frankly, as people say, there is some of that. And I do think that ideally, we would say one way that some of these things wouldn't happen is don't resist the police. Basically just do what they say. And as you said, putting your objections later after the heat of the moment has passed, if you feel that you've been stopped unfairly, if you feel that something has gone wrong, you can lodge the complaint. These days, there are more channels for getting your complaint out than there used to be. Social media means that you can basically have your say and possibly have it picked up much more easily than you could have in, say, 1974, but not then. None of the walking away, none of the yelling and screaming, none of the spitting, et cetera. And I feel like I'm black, and I can't say that because I feel like a lot of people feel that these people are having their say in a society that is dedicatedly, set against the well being of black people and black men in particular. And I just feel like many people simply couldn't hear that. There's a part of them that feels like this resistance of arrest in cases like this is a kind of new form of civil rights. And I sense that I could cut through that even less likely than I could make people understand that a George Floyd who was white, such as Tony Timpa four years before him, very similar situation, could have been killed under the same indefensible conditions. So it's a tough one. But no, what you said, I stand behind you, you were correct. And I thought to myself, it's kind of sad that you're not allowed to make this kind of logical sense when talking about these issues, because so much of it has been encrusted in what's thought of as higher reasoning. But is really a kind of performance art that serves more to make people feel secure in themselves within the structure of elect religion than to prevent bad things from happening to people. And so, for example, George Floyd take away the war on drugs, and the cops would have much less reason to patrol disadvantaged black communities. And many negative interactions that's not what happened to be happening with George Floyd, but many negative interactions wouldn't happen simply by virtue of that. There's an educational crisis with kids that disproportionately affects disadvantaged. Black kids, which has to do with how reading is taught and to be very quick about it. Reading should be taught by teaching kids how to sound out words. You'd think that was the most natural thing in the world. But there are other reading philosophies where you teach kids to recognize words as whole pieces because English spelling is weird, and you let them do that instead of, frankly, learning how to read. You and I probably learned by reading chunks, and that's because we are middle class readaholic kinds of people. But for kids who come from not booklined homes, from kids who come from places where most communication is oral rather than on the page, you need to be taught the good old fashioned way. It's surprising how that does not happen for a great many black kids who really need it. And once you're just an okay reader, you're never going to be all that great in school. And you can't make the most of, say, a moderate, although not great, school because you weren't taught how to read write. I had seen this happen. And finally, there needs to be free, easy access to long term acting contraceptives that are reversible, but for five years, make it so that you can do family planning without having to work too hard. Way too many births of children are accidental. And if a lower income mom does not want to have kids until she's gotten on her feet, a way to avoid the kinds of accidents that happen to almost anybody in the course of life is to have these contraceptives be available to as many women as possible. And this would, of course, cover black as well as Latino and white women. Women of that demographic in all colors have been shown in studies to like these. No, talk about eugenics is appropriate here. It's just about being able to plan your family without thinking too hard and without so many births being accidents, especially if you're somebody who would prefer not to interrupt the growth of a child once it started. Yes, I'm talking about abortion. If you don't want to have an abortion, great. But the larks, as they're called, make it so that you don't end up having to deal with those choices. If you did those three things, just those three, it would solve so many problems for black people who need help, and all three of those things would go a good 80% of the way towards solving the problems we're talking about. Regardless of how Derek Chauvin or however you pronounce his name, feels about black people, in his heart of hearts, however privileged white people are or aren't, it would really put black America back on its feet. But we're not supposed to think about anything so proactive because those aren't religious thoughts. We're supposed to think about things that are more emotional, things that are more interpersonal, things that make you feel like you've got the Lord in you. And that's where you get books like books like White Fragility. That's where you get books like how to Be an Antiracist and oh, my goodness gracious, that's where you get how to Raise an Antiracist Baby, which means that my children, five and eight, are going to have teachers. This is what scares me to my socks. My kids are going to run into this, and I'm trying to think of what I'm going to do about it. They're going to be these teachers with shining eyes, not cynics shining eyes, teaching my biracial daughters that they need to primarily think of themselves as black girls who are going to suffer racism at the hands of their white classmates. And I say, no, no, no. But I'm afraid that we're getting to the point where there's no school that I could put them in, where I could keep them from that, and I don't have time to home school. That's what's worrying me. But we need a real race sociopolitics that's about getting out on the ground and doing real things, and instead we are engaging in a kind of charismatic naval gazing, and I think that we really need to get past it. I'm in precisely that same position with respect to the education of my daughters, and it's amazing to witness. I think you just have to, at the appropriate moment, have the conversation with them, to inoculate them against the brainwashing that's coming or that has already started. But it's a fascinating thing to try to navigate. I want to linger on this issue of the police videos because they have such an outsized effect on everything that's happening here. Comparatively very few of them that have been widely seen. We really are talking about something like a dozen or two dozen videos that have defined this moment culturally. Now, no doubt there are thousands upon thousands of them available. I've watched many more than dozens. The thing that I just want to reiterate about these videos is that they are very hard to understand, much less understand dispassionately, right? These are functioning, as you say, they have a religious significance. These are held up as icons in orthodox Christianity. I mean, it's like this is the moral core of the religion, the injustice that is patently obvious here with a frame of this phone, and yet they're functioning, to my eye, much more like a kind of pornography of grievance and distrust of institutions. And again, they're just reliably misunderstood by even very well intentioned people who are who are not implicated at all in the video. You know, it's just, you know, my mother can't understand these videos. She she reflexively sees everything that Ibrahim Kendi would want her to see. Naively coming to one of these videos. The thing to point out is that for every video you've seen, whether it's the George Floyd video or, you know, Eric Garner or, or any of these other ones, I mean, one, there are differences among them that are incredibly important, right? I mean, this is for anyone who understands violence and what cops can do and should do to protect themselves and the public once things start running off the rails. All of these videos are highly non, analogous with one another, and yet that is virtually never acknowledged. And the cases where we don't have video, but where we know something about what happened, like the Michael Brown case, just totally unlike these other cases, each is the dissimilarities need to be noticed. But then, for every video you want to fasten on as emblematic of the problem of racism and police violence, you just have to know that there are other videos where all the relevant variables are reversed, where the skin color of all participants, cops and victims, are reversed. Right? You just swap that all out, and you can find that video. And one thing that largely goes unacknowledged is there are videos where the thing that the cops are most worried about suddenly getting shot in the face by the person who, until a moment before, showed no sign of being armed, those videos are there to be seen, too, right? So the thing that explains how spun up the cops often are in these circumstances where they're shouting commands and going increasingly berserk in the presence of a non compliant person, one it so often speaks to their lack of training, they simply don't have all the tools they need to nonviolently control somebody. We're speaking now on a day, the day after a video that's, especially disturbing, has circulated, which makes many of these points for me. And there's a video out of Tulsa, I believe, of a white person being pulled over where the cops, two cops, are attempting to make an arrest. And it's not clear from at least the version I saw, which now has several million views. I saw it on Twitter. It's not clear how this all started. I'm sure this person was driving like a maniac or you don't know why the cops are so spun up. But once they're engaging him in the car, they are getting ready to TASE him, and they do, and it doesn't work. And again, tasers often don't work. Then they begin pepper spraying him. The guy just refuses to get arrested. He does not want to come out of the car. They're trying to pull him out of the car. They don't have the skills to physically do this well, where they can keep himself safe and actually immobilize him. So they're yanking on him every which way and shooting him with pepper spray. And the guy is complaining about the injustice of this all, and he's innocent, and it's a violation of his rights, and why are you doing this? And had he been black up until the final frames of this video, this would be yet another case of monstrous misbehavior on the part of cops. I would have heard of it by now, right? Exactly. Yeah. And in the sovereign citizen lunatic cult in white society, I'm sure it also is emblematic of, you know, the overreach of state violence. But what happens at the end of this video is this guy is wearing a T shirt and shorts. I don't I don't think it's even clear where he pulls the gun from. I think it probably was on in his waistband. He might have retrieved it from his car as he was being pulled out. But up until the last moment where you think, okay, I'm not sure why they're tasing him and spraying him with pepper spray, but, you know, the cops are really freaked out, and this guy they're just not successfully arresting this guy. He's got his cell phone in one hand, and the next thing you know, both cops are shot. I think one has died. I'm not sure about the state of the other. And every cop knows on an hourly basis that this is a possibility every single time they have an encounter with a member of the public. It is absolutely obvious from the cop's eye view of the world that it is very hard to tell who the bad guys are. And we live in a society awash with guns. And so you owe it to yourself. If you're someone who has been successfully propagandized by the Black Lives Matter, take on all the famous videos. You need to see a few videos like this one from Tulsa to know what cops are dealing with. This is a traffic stop, and you get to watch two cops, at least one cop, be executed because of it. And that's the complete conversation about this. And so, yeah, the punchline is, whatever you're being arrested for, it doesn't matter that, you know, you're innocent. You have to follow directions so as to minimize the possibility that the cop is going to feel that something you're doing with your hands is presenting such an intolerable risk to his safety or her safety that they have to draw their gun and point it at your head. And now you're risking being killed for no good reason. Yeah. So often it's about somebody who reaches and it's clear that the cops are really afraid of somebody reaching for a gun and killing them. And I would have to assume that they're not afraid of that for no reason. And yet there seems to be a notion out there that that's something that the cops are only afraid of when it's a black person. And it leads me to something that I've come to realize over the years about these cop cases. And I should say, and I think it's very important for me to say this I was not thinking this way until about four years ago. I had the BLM thought about this. Many people who don't like me don't know that in my books I have written about this. I have a whole essay about the police and profiling. I knew this was the one thing that justified the way people like this think, as opposed to, frankly, everything else about being black. But the thing about this is that whenever you see a video such as the ones that we've seen now from Minneapolis and Kenosha, there seems to be a new one about every week these days is first of all, you have to think, is there a point? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, do I have housekeeping today? I don't think so. Today I'm speaking with Richard Dawkins. Richard really needs no introduction on this podcast, but please note that he has a new book out titled Outgrowing God a Beginner's Guide. In this conversation, we mostly take your questions and we start by discussing the strangeness of the genes eye view of the world. We then move on to the limits of Darwinian thinking when applied to human life. We talk about his concept of the extended phenotype and memetics. We look at how ideologies act as meme complexes. We talk about whether consciousness might be an epiphenomenon and therefore might not have been evolved under selective pressure. And then we talk about psychedelics and meditation. I actually lead Richard in a guided meditation and the effects of that you can hear for yourself. And I'll have something more to say in my afterward. So now, without further delay, I bring you Richard Dawkins. Be you still trembling heart. Remember the wisdom out of the old days. Him who trembles before the flame and the flood and the winds that blow through the starry ways. Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood cover over and hide, for he has no part with the lonely, majestical multitude. What poem is that? It's an early one. It's from the wind among the reeds, I think. Well, that was a wonderful reading and the perfect sound check. I am here with Richard Dawkins. Richard, thanks for joining me again on the podcast. Thank you very much. And thank you for coming to the Biltmore Hotel rather than making me go to your studio. This is old school. I I love it. So, you know, you you and I have done a bunch of events together. Yes. I hope we haven't run out of things to talk about. I worry about that kind of thing. Yeah. So in the interest of not running to that problem, I decided to go out on social media and ask for questions. And that's the perfect algorithm because I know what kinds of questions we've hit in the past, and this simultaneously gets us what our respective audiences want to hear. And I have no fear that we're going to COVID the same territory in the same way again. I hope one or two of them may have seen my new book, maybe not, maybe too recently out, I don't know. So let's just mention the new books just so that we've done that. The new book is outgrowing. God. Outgrowing God. Yeah. And this is for teenagers, right? Yes. It's sort of quite a lot of complaints of being this is just like the God delusion. It actually isn't just like the God delusion. It's different. And it's sort of designed for teenagers. Yes. We can obviously spend as much time or as little time on these questions as we want and open any doors that they suggest to us. But the first frivolous question is, and this surprises me this means nothing, but do you realize that the most prominent atheists are all Aries? So you're an Aries. I'm an aries. Hitch was an aries. Dennett is an aries. Matt Dillahunty is an Aries. The great film director Otto Preminger once approached by a starlet on the set of one of his films. She said, oh, gee, Mr. Preminger, what sign are you? And he said, I am a do not disturb sign. That's my attitude towards astrology. Right. Well, I guess Aries don't believe in astrology. So the first question, which I think will set us on a nice path, it won't preempt everything else, but this is somebody who clearly is exasperated with the prospect that we might focus exclusively on atheism or bashing religion. And he says, for goodness sake, get him talking in detail about the genes eye view of natural selection, the extended phenotype, the arguments surrounding group selection and punctuated equilibrium, the way memetics has rather ironically taken on a life of its own and so on. Not just God, for God's sake. So this covers a lot of ground and I do want to do those topics justice. I think people are so casually aware of the revolution that has been wrought in our thinking based on our understanding of Darwinism. And it was really crystallized in your book The Selfish Gene. But it has kind of receded into the background of our thinking and it is such a strange view of the mechanics of things and the logic of things. And so maybe let's just spend a little time talking about the nature of replication. I like to think if it has receded into the background, that's because it's simply accepted which among professional biologists of the sort of field type, it has yeah, I'm thinking the general public, even perhaps the general public, I suppose it is a bit strange and it sort of is a turning on its head. Of the what used to be the more orthodox view. Darwin saw natural selection at the level of the individual. So he thought of individuals as competing with each other within the species. He was always a within species competition. And he was, of course, aware that survival is only a means to the end of reproduction. And his other great book well, one of his other great books, The Descent of man, is largely about sexual selections. The Darn was thoroughly aware that success at reproduction was also vitally important and any hereditary tendency to be, for example, sexually attractive or good at competing with members of their own sex would also be favored. But Darwin didn't have gene language. He had no concept of the particulate gene which mendel introduced. And that that particular view of genetics was actually essential to natural selection because, as was pointed out in Darwin's own time, if genetics was blending, as everybody in the 19th century except mendel thought if we were all a kind of mixture of our father and our mother, then variation would disappear as the generations went by. Each generation would be more uniform than the previous one, in which case there would be no variation left for natural selection to work on. This was actually advanced as an argument against natural selection. Actually, of course, it's an argument against manifest facts because we don't get more alike as the generations by mendel solved that problem, but Darwin didn't realize it. I don't think Mendel realized it properly. And it wasn't until the neodarwinian synthesis of the 1930s that it was realized that actually a natural selection is all about genes changing their frequency. So some genes become more frequent in the population, others less frequent in the population. That's what it's all about. I suppose all that I did, really, was to take that neodarwinian view and put it in a slightly more poetic way and say that that means that the individual is just a vehicle for carrying genes around and passing them on and it's temporary. I called it a throwaway survival machine. Right? That's the strange idea. You called it strange and that is a bit strange. I suppose I call them a robot survival machine. And an individual organism is is a device for passing on genes. The selfish gene is quite largely about not selfishness. It's often misunderstood because of the title as being about selfishness. Or even an advocacy of selfishness is actually mostly about altruism. The selfish gene explains altruism at the individual level. Right. But if you take a genes eye view of human life, many strange things happen. First you see that there's a logic by which certain genes would have been selected for and the behaviors they would encode would be grandfathered into the human condition. And yet evolution can't see most of what we care about. The logic of evolution is anything that has allowed these specific replicators to perpetuate themselves has been selected for. Right. So we are here to spawn and to ensure that our progeny successfully spawn. And I don't know what age do you think historically evolution ceases to care about us? I guess grandparents are still oh, there's no sudden cut off. And it's it's it's a gradual yeah process. But the older the older an animal is, the more likely it is already to have reproduced. Right? And so we're all descended from ancestors, most of whom reproduced when they were relatively young. A few may have been reproduced when they were old. And this, of course, is why we age, because we're descended from young ancestors. And very often whatever it took to be successful when you were young made you actually more likely to die. And this is especially true, of course, of sexual selection, where brilliantly colored male birds, say, are more likely to propagate genes for being brilliantly colored but then dying because brilliant colored attract predators. Just the matter they attract females. And that's an extreme case. But that sort of model for the Darwinian theory of aging. Right, but there's still something about the extended family that would have been selected for. You would think grandparents are good for helping. That's right. In those species where grandparents can, there may be a kind of changeover point where when you get to a certain age, you can do your genes more good by caring for grandchildren than you can by having more children. That, again, wouldn't be a sudden cut off point. But that probably is true of humans and a number of other species. Perhaps. But if we're talking about running viable governments and societies into democracies capitalism, pursuing scientific interests, building technology that doesn't destroy us, these are things that obviously are parasitic on cognitive traits that have been evolved. But evolution can't really see these details. No, that's right. I think that so much of our human life is has gone beyond natural selection. Natural selection put us in the world and the way that we are and our brains and our bodies are designed by natural selection to survive under wild conditions in Africa, and we've now moved beyond that. And so what we think of as successful in our society is really sort of pretty much left natural selection behind. But yes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is an observation that several of us have made in various contexts. If you were going to take a rigorously genes eye view of the human circumstance certainly as a man the thing you would want to do most the thing that you would find most fulfilling in life the thing to which you would purpose more or less every day is to donate your sperm to a sperm bank so that you could have tens of thousands of children for whom you have no financial or resource responsibility. The fact that sperm donors are actually paid is thoroughly underwinian and is a wonderful example of how far we have actually advanced. It's not that surprising because natural selection cannot build into our brains a kind of cognitive awareness of what our genes, so to speak, would want. All it can do is build in rules of thumb which would work under natural conditions. And so a desire for sex makes perfect sense because that for the whole of history, evolutionary has tended to lead to reproduction. But a desire to donate your sperm is something quite different. It cannot foresee that technology, natural selection, can't see that there have been a few notorious cases of doctors who substituting their own sperm for donors and things like that. But it is to a naive Darwinian, it is a surprising fact that sperm donors have to be paid. A naive Darwinian would think that they would pay to donate their sperm, right? Yeah. And pay quite a lot. Yes. Let's just talk about what genes are for a moment. Genes are a kind of memory. They're a kind of encoding of knowledge in the sense that and stop me if you think at any point these analogies break down. But I'm hearing echoes of David Deutsche here, where it's knowledge as a kind of solution to a problem. It's a genetically inscribed solution to problems that our ancestors have successfully faced. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I have a chapter in unweaving the rainbow called the Genetic Book of the Dead. Just sort of takes off from the is it a Hindu classic? The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Book of the Dead. Sorry, buddhist, yes. So the genetic book of the dead. I see the genome, well, let's say the genes of a species as a coded document describing ancestral world in which ancestors survived. That's sort of true because they are a filtered subset of genes which have helped ancestors to survive. And in principle, it should be possible in some future date for when technology has advanced, for a knowledgeable geneticist to read the genome of an individual and actually read off a description of the worlds in which the ancestors of that animal lived. To a lesser extent, I think perhaps it's easier you can read the body of the animal. I like to think that if you took a whole lot of water dwelling animals, say, mammals, it would be otters, seals, whales, water truths, marsupial, swimming animals and things. They'd all have webbed feet, say, for example, except whales. So that's an obvious one. But if you actually made a list of characteristics of water dwelling mammals and compared it with, say, desert dwelling mammals, you would find a whole lot of things that all the water dwelling ones have in common, including probably some biochemical ones, some genetic ones. And so that's part of the description. The Genetic Book of the Dead describes water or describes desert. Right. And one day, maybe I'll even write a book called the Genetic Book of the Dead trying to flesh out this idea. Yeah. And of course, it could also look forward prospectively to situations which we now to take the human case are not well adapted to that's. Right. The Genetic Book of the Day has always got to be a description of the past, and it helps the animal to survive to the extent that the future resembles the past, which on the whole, it does. If the world were totally capricious such that you could not predict the future on the basis of the past, then natural selection wouldn't work. But nature doesn't vary capriciously as the years go by. On the whole, tomorrow is pretty similar to yesterday, actually. There was a specific question that touches on that point that someone asks, why do we need vaccinations or acquired immunity to diseases at all? Why can't the mother pass on her immunity to her offspring? Wouldn't that be an enormous evolutionary benefit? So we have acquired immunity because on the assumption that the environment does change enough that that's the best algorithm to run. Yes, I suppose the immune system is a kind of short term, moment to moment substitute for natural selection. Natural selection works over generations and equips the animal to deal with circumstances that arise perennially or at least over over a long period. The immune system is all about equipping the animal, adapting the animal to insults that attack it during its own lifetime. From moment to moment. There are always new epidemics, always, always new viruses cropping up. Right. So that's what the immune system is about. And and vaccination is as it was sort of preparing the immune gaming of that. Yeah. But it would seem good to be immune to everything that your mother had encountered. It would. I suppose we tend to be immune to everything that most of our ancestors have encountered, but just our mother. We don't seem to have a mechanism for passing on the particular. If the mother had chickenpox, we don't inherit an immunity to chickenpox. One thing that's framing this part of the conversation for me is I watched your somewhat stifling conversation with Brett Weinstein, who I greatly admire, who I've done many events with, but he had a kind of ax to grind with you around, if not group selection, something he was calling lineage selection. And more broadly speaking, a sense that evolutionary thinking should cover many of the details of human life, like warmaking genocide, nationalism, to a degree that you were disinclined to extend it. And also just this notion that religion should certainly be considered an extended phenotype. Memetics generally should be considered an extended phenotype. And I'm just wondering what the I mean, I can't do a good impersonation of Brett for this conversation, but I'm wondering just what are your concerns there and what are the limitations in Darwinian thinking when we're talking about high level human social phenomenon and psychological phenomenon? First of all, I hugely admire Brett Weinstein's stand at Ridiculous University that he used to be a member of. Evergreen? Yeah. Evergreen, yes. I mean, he's a real hero standing up against that nonsense. The extended phenotype, I think, is often misused. The idea that it's anything is often misused. And I think we should remind people what a phenotype? Yes, I should. Phenotype is that which the genes engineer in a body, which in a Darwinian sense would help the genes to survive. So wings are part of the phenotype of genes that help the genes survive and behavior patterns and crests and sharp talons and sharp teeth and things. So we normally think of genes program bodies to develop phenotypes. Phenotypes help bodies to survive, and that helps the genes that built them survive. That's the normal way it happens. And genes do it by the processes of embryonic development, causing the body to develop the necessary phenotypes. The extended phenotype is phenotype, which is outside the body in which the gene sits. And my classic examples of this are animal artifacts, things like birds nests, where the nest, especially a complicated nest like that of a weaver bird, obviously an adaptation. It's just like an organ. It's beautifully shaped for a particular purpose. Beautifully shaped, for example, a long tubular nest to prevent snakes getting in. That is a perfectly good phenotype. Right, but it's not part of the body. Yes, the genes are producing that nest. The genes are producing that and they're producing it. They're still doing it via embryology. But the embryology then, as it were, reaches outside the body in the form of behavior, in this case, nest building behavior. But that's only a yet one more step in the embryonic chain of causation. The embryonic chain of causation begins with DNA influencing proteins and that influences something else. Which influences something else cell division, neuron production in the brain, which has the eventual consequence of causing the bird to build a nest of a particular shape. So there's just this chain of causation starting with DNA protein and going through various complicated steps in embryology, and then the final steps are outside the body. So I call it the extended phenotype. Well, then the idea is generalized to I just want to pause here at the risk of derailing you, I want to pause here to close the door to a certain species of doubt that evolution can explain the diversity of life that we see. So now I'm just closing the door to the creationists and the intelligent designers for the moment, because one of the concerns is that you take any example of phenotype. You take a batswing, for instance. Evolution could not have produced a batswing de novo by functional batswing. What you need is some incremental path from no wing at all to a bat swing. And each increment has to survive the logic of evolution. It has to be useful and lead to differential success. So you have to imagine here to explain any speciation and any path by which we have reached the diversity of life that we see, you have to explain how each increment, the first little bump that became the wing, how that in itself was useful. And many people just throw up their hands there and say, well, there's clearly no way you can do that. So there must be some other explanation. Yes, thank you for reminding people of that. I mean, that is, of course, very important. And of course, the evolution has to take whatever is there and modify it. So it's not like a little bump that appears. In this case, it's already existing arm in the case of insects, probably was a little bump because that's not using an existing limb. But yes, you're of course right. With a bat it's literally the hand. Yeah, as a membrane stretched between the fingers, which is not difficult to engineer embryologically, because in the embryo there already is a membrane between the fingers and actually it's carved away. There's a kind of sculpture process whereby the membrane is removed. All that needs to happen in bats is that that sculpting process didn't happen. The membrane state. And of course, fingers get hugely long. Terrace laws do it differently. They just have one big finger and they stretch that between the legs. And birds do it differently again, but in every case, it makes use of what's already there and modifies what's already there. Rather than starting de novo, which is what a human engineer would do, start with a clean design on the on the drawing board. Yeah, but I was thinking about the extended phoenix, actually, before we get there. So what is the argument that some non functional precursor wing would nevertheless have been useful enough? Yes, this is a favorite problem. What's the use of half a wing? There are a large number of animals that don't exactly fly, but slightly increase there's. For example, arboreal animals, squirrels, say, who leap from branch to branch. And it's a dangerous process, leaping from branch to branch. And so any slight increase in flight surfaces not really flight surfaces, but any slight increase in the surface area that's presented to the air will increase the distance that a squirrel can leap. The tail, the fluffy tail of a squirrel acts as a sort of rudimentary aerofoil that increases the distance that a squirrel can jump to. Well, now, flying squirrels, they're just squirrels, but they have a membrane between the fore limb and the hind limb, which started out, no doubt, as just a bit of membrane in the armpit, which just slightly increased. The could just leap 1ft further because of that. And then when that was there, then next generation, perhaps ten generations, could leap 10ft further. So you have a steady gradient of improvement. Are there orthogonal gradients that could explain some of these intermediate forms, like heat regulation or something that well, that's been suggested for insects. Yes, it's been suggested that in the insect, they really did start by just bumps growing out of the thorax rather than modifying existing limbs. And it has been suggested that originally these were thermal regulatory or were solar panels. And then when they got out to a certain size for their thermoregulatory function, then they then happened to act as aerofoils, and so they then became wings. And insect wings are moved not by limbs, as I said, but by movements of the thorax. So the thoraxes, there are muscles in the thorax that contracted in various ways which cause these flaps to go up and down. Interestingly, some insects flap their wings up and down with a separate neural command from the central nervous system, saying, up, down, up, down. But other insects have a kind of motor, sort of oscillating motor, where all that the central nervous system says is switch on or switch off. And the motor itself does rhythmic up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. And the frequency of the oscillation is determined not by the central nervous system, but just by the harmonic properties of the motor system. Yeah. Okay, so back to the extended phoenix. Yeah. Well, the next step after the idea of artifacts, after the idea of birds nest, say there are many cases where parasites manipulate their hosts to increase the chance that they will be propagated to the next stage of the parasitic cycle. So flukes, for example, usually have an intermediate host, which might be a snail or it might be an ant, and they need to get into their definitive host, which might be a sheep or a cow. And so in the case of the so called brain worm in the ant, for example, the worm in the ant burrows into the brain of the ant and changes the behavior of the ant to make the ant more likely to be eaten by a sheep. It crawls up to the top of stems in the heat of the day rather than going down to the ground. So the parasite is a kind of puppet master, which is manipulating the ant to get well, now, that, to me, is an extended phenotype because genes in the worm have their phenotypic effect in ant behavior. Yeah, I think isn't there some evidence that Toxoplasmosis and some other organisms operate in mammals like ourselves and very likely in people in similar ways to make us more likely to pass it on? Yeah, modifying modifying behavior. I mean, rabies is the classic example. The rabies virus actually makes rabid dog, for example, more likely to bite and froth at the mouth and pass on the virus when it bites. It also makes the animal more likely to roam and wander far and wide rather than stick around it at home, which then spreads the virus more widely. So that's extended to be a type of a parasite. And then you can say, well, parasites don't always live inside their hosts. Cuckoos manipulate their hosts. A cuckoo nestler terrible bird. Yeah, terrible bird manipulates the host with beautiful adaptations. I mean, super normal gape and things like that. This is, again, manipulating the host behavior. The change in the host behavior is an extended phenotype of cuckoo genes. Genes that change host behavior are more likely to survive again, it works via cuckoo embryology. But the final stage in that chain of events in cuckoo embryology is to produce behavior which seduces the host reed, warbler, whatever it robin, whatever it is. And so that, again, is extended phenotype. And then the next final stage in my argument would be all bird song, all animal communication where one animal manipulates another you can think of as extended phenotype. So a gene that changes in one animal has an extended phenotypic effect on another animal via a call, a song, a crest, a flash, a conspicuous signal. So my whole vision of animal signaling is a great network of extended phenotypes. Right. Okay. So before we talk about the prospect of something like religion or any other doctrine or institution being extended phenotype for humankind. Let's briefly talk about this other species of replicator, the Meme, which is a term of your coinage, which has an importantly different connotation now that we've all spent our lives on social media. But these are also it's actually a decent analogy to the memes. I wanted to make the point that what matters is replication. Genes are consummate replicators and they achieve their replication success by manipulating bodies via the processes of embryology. But I wanted to make the point that any replicator could do that doesn't have to be DNA. And of course, on other planets it almost certainly isn't DNA. If there is life on other planets. Probably is. But then I said, well, maybe we don't have to go to other planets because maybe memes, maybe cultural replicators could be the basis of Darwinian selection. There certainly are cultural replicators, no doubt about that. I mean, things spread. Does it matter that they don't randomly vary? The mutation isn't I don't think that matters. No. I mean, it incidentally happens to be true that genetic mutation is random. But even that is only random in the sense that it's not guided towards improvement. But mutation is not random in other senses. Mutations are induced by cosmic rays, for example. That's non random. But mutation is random in the sense that it's not. What do you mean it's non random if it comes from cosmic ray bombardment? Well, it has a cause. It's predictable if you subject yourself to but the specific base pair that's being targeted is random, presumably. That's true. Yes, that's true. But what's more important is that it's random with respect to improvement. So there's no tendency for mutation to be, as it were, anticipating what's necessary for survival. It's random in that sense and the great majority of mutations are actually deleterious. Okay, so but so when we talk about memes right, so now meme is almost any cultural product, an idea that is that is replicated. That's replicated. So it could be a close fashion or something like that, or a speech mannerism. Right. Awesome. Is which I use with disconcerting frequency. Do you? I never use it. I've given up. I mean, it's such a wonderful word to mean what it really does mean. Right now it just means kind of okay, I'm part of the slide into degradation. Yes. When language evolves, I am an American, this would be good case because language does evolve and so we have to accept that. Yeah. And I think there probably is some randomness, and not to say cosmic ray bombardment, that accounts for the changes in speech patterns. But most memes, it seems to me the changes in them are engineered at least with some forward thought. It doesn't really matter. Natural selection would still work even if genetic mutation was engineered. And of course it can be. We are now in a position. To do that right. That's what genetic engineering is, which I will talk about. So the fact that the basis for the change, directed or not, you still have an environment where things are competing and there's differential success, and so the environment is providing a kind of selection mechanism. Yes. So memes ideas, ways of doing things, really, all of human culture and ideology, this is being continually produced and spread and going in and out of fashion. And so this is this domain of memetics. And there literally are what are now called memes on the Internet, graphics paired with text that spread on social media, that spread various ideas. I don't know. How do you feel about that appropriation? Well, I'm not particularly keen on that appropriation because it rather I mean, they are a very specific example of a meme, a meme of I would rather think about whether natural selection of sort actually guides the spread of memes. And I like the idea of a meme complex or meme plex, where something like a religion like Roman Catholicism could be regarded as a mean complex. Right. And individual memes might be the idea of life after death or the idea that you have to confess your sins, the virgin birth. Virgin birth. And just like gene complexes are sets of genes which flourish in each other's presence, and that, I think, is an extremely important idea in genetic evolution. So there might be something similar in meme complexes. Yeah. So there's like there's a common fate to these various genes, various memes. They're all hitched together. That's right. I like to think of, say, the gene complex of a carnivore species like leopards, where you have carnivorous teeth, carnivorous eyes, carnivorous brains, carnivorous limbs. They all go together. And on the other hand, you have antelope. I mean, the herbivore prey eyes, noses, limbs, et cetera, which go together. If you suddenly plumped an antelope gene into a leopard gene pool, it probably wouldn't work. It wouldn't cooperate well with the other genes of the of the leopard gene complex. A very skittish leopard. Yes, yes. The cowardly leopard. Cowardly leopard. And so a species is a collection of mutually compatible genes which go well together, as opposed to another species, which is complex of different genes. Well, I believe you might do the same kind of thing with meme complexes, but the theory hasn't been really sort of worked out. I think it might be okay, so we have meme complexes, something like Roman Catholicism. And what was being urged upon you in your conversation with Brett and I've seen this come up many times before, is that something like Roman Catholicism should be or religion in general should be considered part of the extended phenotype of I've never liked that. I think that's taking the idea of the extended phenotype beyond where it should be, and I think it detracts from people's ability to comprehend the idea of the extended phenotype. Extended phenotype is supposed to be a genetic effect which manifests itself outside the body in the same kind of ways genetic effect manifests itself inside the body. I don't think Brett does this, but people have sometimes said to me, isn't a building like the building in the moment, an extended phenotype? And I think that would only be true if, say, there were genes that caused architects to design a different kind of building. And there aren't. I mean, there's no gene that makes an architect more likely to make Gothic arches rather than Romanesque arches. Our mere survival dependence on buildings is not enough to no, I don't think so, because variation in buildings is not under genetic control. Right? And I doubt very much that variation in religious habits is under genetic control. If it was, then you might make some sort of a case for talking about extending times. It's not like that. And so I think that it's possible to push an idea too far, and I think that's what's going on here. So what what about the prospect that having religions led to differential success of various groups, human beings? Well, that's quite a different idea and that's worth considering in its own right. And also it's what's worth considering in its own right is the idea that individuals having religions might survive better. That's been suggested and might be true. This opens the door to what's been called group selection. Yes, and I've never been a fan of group selection. Darwin himself it wasn't called group selection then. Darwin almost always was talking about individuals surviving better within a species. But Darwin did, again in The Descent of man, in one passage, talk about a kind of group selection where he suggested that groups of humans who had some kind of social cohesion, who behaved well towards each other, had altruism toward each other cooperation, would be more likely to survive than groups that didn't. And so that would be a form of group selection. I suppose in some ways I prefer to compare that not to group selection but to species competition. A bit like when the graceful was introduced from America into Britain as a sort of frivolous exercise. We did that to you. Was that a good idea or a bad idea? And it drove the red squirrel extinct. And so I think that would be a better analogy for a group that, say, has a war like aggressive god, like Yahweh or like some of the Norse gods. You could make a case that having a militaristic god, maybe one who rewards martyrs in a martyr's heaven, that kind of religion might spread as a kind of group effect, as a kind of species effect, an ecological competition effect. But I would call that ecological competition rather than group selection. I think we have, because it's so let's just create an example. Let's say that Hitler won the Second World War and we are now living under the thousand year reich and everyone who's not a Nazi is now dead. So Nazism would have triumphed over all competing political ideologies so that we on some level, you can say, well, this is a selective effect. Right. There were various competitors for political ways of thinking, and one has finally dominated and canceled all others. But that doesn't seem to suggest an analogy to the replication model. I don't think it does. No, I don't think it does. Slightly closer would be if, say, within any country, individuals who espoused Nazi beliefs were more likely to survive than individuals who didn't. So there would be an individual differential survival effect, which probably would also be the case. That would be a closer analogy to Darwinian selection. And we might do a kind of Mimetic analysis of that nazi memes survive better than anti Nazi memes, for example. That would be the case of Mimetics. Yeah, I think that seems that might actually be the environment we're currently in on social media comment on that. So I guess one final question here. Are there outstanding questions in what is now called the neo Darwinian picture that are significant challenges to the model? I mean, there are many people and Brett, frankly is one of these people. There are many people speaking as though neodarwinism and perhaps you should actually define that term is basically flawed in a way that should be troubling to biologists and public intellectuals. Yes. I don't think that I mean, any flourishing science will will change, of course. And Steve Gould was fond of saying that the modern synthesis is effectively dead. And I thought that was a rather irritating attempt at almost self publicity. He was irritating in in many ways. First defined well, okay, neodarminism is the neodarwinian synthesis was a joint effort in the 1930s, really, of, I think, above all, RA Fischer, JBS. Haldane, sewell wright, ernst meyer, Theodosius objanski, gigi simpson and others. And it was seeing Darwinian evolution as changes in gene frequency in populations. That was the population genetic part of it seeing well, the paleontological part of it would be seeing major macroevolutionary change as microevolution writ large. The geneticist was showing how, from generation to generation, you could get slight changes in gene frequency. And the paleontologists like Simpson was showing that such micro evolutionary changes extrapolated over millions of years, tens, hundreds of millions of years could produce changes from fish to mammal. So this movement of the 1930s and 40s, we're still in it. It hasn't really changed much. There have been, I suppose, W. D. Hamilton with his analysis of altruism kin selected altruism is one major advance of the 1960s and 70s. But we're still in the neo Darwinian era. And you don't think there are gaping holes in the theory that should keep people no, I don't. I mean, there are questions that remain to be answered. One of the big riddles is the evolution of sex, what sex is good for, and lots of the most distinguished neo Darwinian theorists have grappled with that problem. The origin of the Darwinian process is still a bit of a mystery. How did the first replicator arise? It almost certainly wasn't DNA, actually. I mean, the first replicator would have been something else, would have been RNA maybe. That's a good possibility and that's one of the more fashionable ideas. But that is still in the realm of theory. It may never become settled because it happened a long time ago and maybe impossible to repeat exactly what happened. We know the kind of thing it was the origin of something self replicating, possibly RNA. What about epigenetics and the way in which this feature of our biology seems to suggest almost a quasi Lamarckian kind of inheritance, this strange word epigenetics because actually, originally it was just another word for the way we see embryology. Every cell in the every mitotic reproducing cell in the body has the same genes, all the genes that your brain cells that's right, yes. And different genes get turned on and so the epigenetic environment of a gene in a brain cell is different from that in a liver cell. That's epigenetics. The word has been hijacked fashionably recently by people with, as you say, a kind of neolamarquian bent to suggest that some of that epigenetic cytoplasmic environment in which some genes are turned on and others are not, can get inherited to the next generation. And that does seem to happen in some cases. So examples like the stress experienced by the mother with the infant in utero, the change in hormonal environment there can actually create some durable effect on the expression of genes in the baby. That does seem to be that there are a few rare cases like that. I don't think it's worth the attention that it's been given. I prefer to reserve the word epigenetics for the ordinary process of embryology and say just occasionally there may be epigenetic effects which do pass on to the next generation, maybe even to the grandchild generation. But it's not one of these things that goes on forever like true genetic mutation. So what is the current frontier of evolutionary voluntary sector? If you could take one of the questions if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I am speaking with Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas has been named one of the world's ten most influential intellectuals by MIT. He is an award winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. He's often described as a media theorist. He is the host of the popular Team Human podcast, and he's written 20 books, including the bestsellers Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed. He's written regular columns for Medium, CNN, The Daily Beast and The Guardian. And he's made documentaries for PBS's show Frontline. And today we discuss his work and his most recent book, which is also titled Team Human. Anyway, it was great to talk to Douglas. We get into many of these issues, and he is certainly someone who spent a lot of time thinking about where we're all headed online. So now, without further delay, I bring you Douglas Rushkoff. I am here with Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas, thanks for coming on the podcast. Hey, thanks so much for having me. So you have a very interesting job description and background. How do you describe what you do and your intellectual journey? I mean, I guess what I do is I am arguing for human autonomy or human agency in an increasingly digital age. And I guess what brought me here was originally I was a theater director and I got fed up with narrative, really, especially these closed ended, predictable, but felt like almost propagandistic narrative of most theater. And the Internet came around and I saw chances for participation and interactivity and sort of the pre open source participatory narrative that we could rewrite the human story and print our own money and make our own meaning and started to write books about that. And I wrote a book called Siberia about designer reality, and one called Media Virus, which was celebrating this new stuff called viral media, which seemed like a good thing at the time. And then I watched as the Internet really became kind of the poster child for a failing Nasdaq stock exchange. And all of these companies, from Google to Facebook that said they would never be about advertising, became the biggest advertising companies in the world. And these tools, which I thought were going to be the new gateway or gateway drug in some ways to a new kind of collective human imagination, ended up being the opposite. So I've been not really writing books or struggling against technology so much as asking people to retrieve the human and bring it forward and embed it in the digital infrastructure rather than just surrendering all of this power and all of these algorithms to agendas that don't really have our best interest at heart. You're often described as a media theorist. Is that a label you happily wear, or does that kind of miss most of what you're up to? I mean, I happily wear it when people understand media theorist and the way I do, but to most people, I feel like the word media theorist sounds like some kind of PBS boring show or something. That's good for you. But when I think of someone like Walter Ong or Marshall Mccluan or Lewis Mumford, then, yeah, because I don't mind being a media theorist, because almost everything is media. It's almost hard to figure out something that's not media. So as someone who thinks about it, sure, but I guess over time, I've become a bit more of a social activist or an economic thinker. It's kind of hard to just to say, I'm thinking about the content on television. I'm thinking more about the platforms and the political economy that's driving this media. Was McLuhan influential for you? I guess I should be embarrassed to say, I mean, I didn't really read McLuhan. He's famously unreadable. Yeah, maybe that's why. But I didn't read him until after people said, oh, your work is like McLuhan's. So I was three books in, really. It was after media virus. People started to say, this is what McLuhan was saying. And so then I went back and read him afterwards. And, yeah, he was crazy smart, but it's a bit like reading Torah or something, where everything he says, I could say, oh, it means this, or it means that. So while it's a terrific intellectual exercise, it's a bit like it becomes like James Joyce, where you can almost argue about it more than make sense of it sometimes. Honestly, part of why I'm excited to be talking with you is because there's certain ideas that I'm really unresolved about and sort of certain understandings of the human story, if you will, that I'm still really challenged by. And in writing this book, I feel like, on the one hand, I'm maybe accidentally or unintentionally telling a new myth. I'm sort of arguing in this book that humanity is a team sport, and that if you look at evolution or even read Darwin, there's just as many examples of cooperation and collaboration leading to species success as there is competition. And that if we want to understand human beings as the most advanced species, we should think about the reasons for that are language and collaboration and increasing brain size. So the Dunbar Number got up to over 100 people that we could collaborate and coordinate. And then, of course, I argue that all the institutions and media and technologies that we came up with to enhance that collaboration, they tend to be used against that. So instead of bringing people together, social media atomizes people into the separate silos or even you can go back and see how text abstracted people from the sort of tribal oral culture and then you could even argue that language before that disconnected people from some essential grunts or something. But that becomes an almost Eden like myth that I don't want to fall into to say oh, don't listen to the libertarian story, listen to this story instead. But then we're stuck in another story. What I'm really aching for, what I'm looking to do is to give people reasons to celebrate humanity for its own sake and human values and retrieve what I consider to be, and I hate even the word but these essential human values without requiring some mythology or some story to justify it. I'd rather justify it with science or with common sense or with some sort of an ethical template than, you know, than some other story, right? My first reaction to some of those ideas is that, you know, basically everything we do, virtually everything, has a potential upside and downside. And the thing that empowers us, the lever that we can pull that moves a lot in our world or in our experience, also shifts some things that we don't want to see moved. As you said, you could walk us all the way back to the dawn of language, right? And obviously language is the source of virtually everything we do that makes us recognizably human, right? It is the main differentiator and yet language under one construal. Anyone who has taken psychedelics or spent a lot of time meditating or trying to learn to meditate recognizes that this compulsive conceptualizing through language, this tiling over of experience that we do just as a matter of course once we learn to think linguistically. It is in most cases the limiting factor on our well being in so many moments because so much of the conversation we have with ourselves is a source of anxiety and despair. And yet we can't have civilization without our full linguistic competence and we certainly want to be able to use it on demand all the time. And basically any other complex technology built on language, every form of media has had this upside and downside. So as you briefly gestured at this now fairly famous notion that just the mere introduction of print and a widespread ability for people to read and write was bemoaned by many intellectuals of the time as a guaranteed way to lose our collective memory, the oral tradition would erode, each person's capacity to memorize things would disappear. And given the advantages of print and reading, that seems like a fairly fatuous concern. And yet it probably is also true, right? You can carry that forward into the present with respect to the way markets and digital technology are changing us, right? I mean, the one difference really between speech, text, radio, television, and today and digital technology is that the algorithms that we're building, the artificial intelligences that we're building, continue on. They change themselves as they go. If the words that we spoke mutated after they were out of our mouths in order to affect people differently, it would be very different than if they were just coming from us. So I get concerned that people are not. Certainly the companies that are building these technologies don't quite realize what they're setting in motion, that the values that they're embedding in these technologies end up well. The technologies end up doing what we tell them, but by any means that they see fit, they keep going, and we're not even privy to the techniques that they're using to elicit whatever response they want from us. So while I could certainly look at capitalism as a system that ended up seemingly kind of having its own agenda and capitalism working on us, and the defenseless CEO or the unconscious shareholder or the worker who's being exploited, that all of these people are kind of stuck in this system that they don't understand. But digital technology seems to make this reversal between the figure and the ground, or I guess McLuhan would say, the medium and the message. But I really just think it's the subject and the object that instead of having these tools that we're putting out there to get things that we want or to help us in some way, we're using these tools to get something out of us. We've turned this language, these machines, on the human psyche. And whether we're using Las Vegas slot machine algorithms or telling them to develop their own, they're looking for exploits in the human psyche. So the exploits aren't things that we look at or notice while we're meditating and go, oh, that's interesting. This must have evolved from the human need to do something. And while on one level it's a neurosis, on the other level, it's part of my human strength. And we could look at how do I want to use this in my life? The algorithm just sees it as a whole, oh, look, I can leverage that person's instinct for reciprocity, or, look, I can see this one trying to establish rapport and taking all of these painstakingly evolved social mechanisms and using them against us, you know, and that's where I can sort of feel that there's a kind of a good and an evil, and I never really go there in any of my prior work. I tried to be kind of non judgmental, but now I'm really arguing that whenever one of these technologies or languages or algorithms, when they're bringing us together, they're doing good, and when they're turning us against each other, they're doing bad. Just to have almost a simple litmus test for people to understand, am I helping or hurting? Are there companies that are getting to scale in the digital economy that are actually doing it well, that are at all aligned with your more idealistic notions of what the Internet could be doing to us and for us? Well, I don't know that there are companies that are doing it. There are certainly organizations that are doing it, whether it's a Mozilla, which invented the browser, really, archive.org, which is a great organization, where tremendous film archives and text archives, and the Gutenberg Project, the example everyone uses Wikipedia, is at scale and doing a good job. But they're not companies as such. The only companies I'm really seeing doing that are cooperatives. And I've gotten inspired by the platform cooperative movement, and there's many companies that sort of model themselves on the famous Spanish montregon cooperative, but basically where workers own the company. But that's not necessarily just a digital tradition. Associated Press is a co op. Ace True Value Hardware is an employee owned co op. So I've seen things reach scale that way, but usually, at least so far, they're not these traditional shareholder owned companies. How would you compare something like Netflix to Facebook? I consider myself a reluctant and none too well informed student of digital capitalism. Essentially, having a podcast and other endeavors, I've had to turn more and more attention to this. But I feel quite late to begin analyzing all of this. But in sort of the front facing, just consumer eye view of these platforms. When I look at Netflix, clearly they're playing games with algorithms, and they're trying to figure out how to maximize my time on their platform. But my experience is I want them to have all the content they can have. I want them to promote content that I find interesting rather than boring or haphazard connection between my interests and what they're promoting. So insofar as their algorithms begin to read my mind and anticipate what I will find interesting, and they do that better and better, and it becomes stickier and stickier on some level, I don't see the downside. I can curate the contents of my own consciousness enough to know that if I've spent 17 uninterrupted hours on Netflix, I've got a problem. So if every time I open that app, things just get better and better, that's good. And the business model there is, I have to pay a subscription fee, and presumably they're not selling my data to anybody, and I'm not the product. Right. Whereas with Facebook, everything is flipped. And again, they're trying to gain my attention and keep me on site. In the case of Facebook, it's completely ineffectual. But they're doing that in order to sell my attention against ads. And we know more and more about the downside of those incentives and that business model. Do you see the distinction between these two companies this way, or is there something I'm missing? No, I definitely see netflix versus Facebook is sort of the same thing to me as Apple versus Google, where here's a company where if I've got the money and that's kind of the sticking point, if I've got the money to pay for it. I can buy television and technology and email and all of these things that are treating me as the customer. And I'm paying for my privacy. I'm paying for my customization. I'm paying for it to understand me for my benefit and my enjoyment. Whereas on Facebook or Google, you know, we understand that we're not the customer and that someone else is paying Facebook or Google to understand us for their benefit and then not just understand us, but tweak us to their benefit. So if Facebook can determine with 80% accuracy that I'm going to go on a diet in the next six weeks, I'm going to start seeing advertising and updates and things to push me towards going on a diet. And they're not just doing that to sell the specific products, the specific diet products that are on their site, but to increase that 80% to 90%. They want to increase the likelihood that I will do the thing that they've predicted I do. So when I look at a platform like that, or when I look at the way YouTube makes suggestions of what videos I should watch, and when I go down three, four videos in, I'm always at some really dangerously extreme version of whatever it was that I was initially interested in. I see these platforms turning me into a caricature of myself or trying to get me to behave more consistently with the statistical algorithm that's predicted my behavior. Whereas on Netflix, the extent to which they use algorithms to deliver up to me what I might like, I find that almost part of the entertainment. You know, I'm interested when I finished narcos Mexico, you know, and I the next if they knew I finished it, then the next morning, I look in my inbox, and they say, here's what we think you might like next. Based on the last six things I watched, as well as how much I paused, how quickly I got through them, I mean, they're using a wealth of information I find it interesting, and I almost enjoy and maybe this is just sickness, but I enjoy using it as a mirror. In other words, what shows do I have to watch on Netflix to get it to suggest Roma? For me, right, because I wanted to think that I'm that kind of person. Apparently you're not that kind of person. I guess not. I watch too much Game of Thrones kinds of things, and they don't realize that I have that side. But the downside with Netflix and their algorithms is not so much what they suggest, but sometimes I'm a little creeped out by the way they construct some of their shows. So we know that House of Cards was partly derived through algorithms. They found out that, oh, people that like David Fincher also like political intrigue. Also like Kevin Spacey. I didn't know that. That's interesting. Yeah, and they concocted it. And then I wondered why the show kind of went through me. Like cheese doodles or something. It's like cheese Doodles is this sort of industrial age, taste, styrofoam sensation that's constructed for me to keep eating. It compulsively, but it doesn't actually deliver any nutrition. And I kind of felt that way with those shows. But the biggest problem right now, and it shouldn't be seen as a problem, is you get what you pay for. And I do get concerned about bifurcating society into these two classes of people, those of us who can afford to maintain our autonomy by paying for our technologies, and those, I suppose, who still need the remedial help of marketing on free platforms. Well, that really is the source of the tension I see, because, again, I have a podcaster's eye view of this. But as someone who's decided not to take ads and to just have listeners support the show, I now have a very clear view of these two business models. There's just the PBS NPR version, which is, this thing is free, and if you want to support it, you can. And I know how that works. And I've just released a meditation app, which is a subscription only service through the App Store, through the Google Play Store. So that's all behind a paywall. And I see that on the podcast side. I have been engaged in this fairly heavy handed effort to educate my audience to support this work if they wanted to exist. You know, many more people engage with the podcast than have ever engaged with my books. I know. I listened to that little six minute piece you did on why you have people, why you want people to contribute, and it articulated what the exact same thing I feel, is I'll do one podcast, or I did one of those Ted Talks for free. More people watch that Ted Talk than have bought all the books I've ever written combined. Yeah, it's amazing. And you want that kind of reach, obviously you want because the goal is as a writer or as a public intellectual or someone with any ideas that you want to spread, you want to reach as many people as can conceivably find them, these ideas valuable. And yet what's happened here is that your phrase, you get what you pay for, I think is true, and yet it's antithetical to everyone's expectations, even mine, frankly. Online, we're expecting our information to be free. There are certain contexts where people understand that they're going to hit a paywall, and that's somehow fine. Like Netflix is the classic example. Here's a pretty clear case. Like, Joe Rogan has a podcast. It's obviously free. It's supported by ads. Millions and millions of people listen to it. But then he often releases a comedy special on Netflix. I don't think there's anyone thinking that they should be able to watch his special for free. I don't think he gets angry emails saying, what the hell? Why are you putting this behind Netflix's paywall? But if he put it on YouTube, if you put online in some other context and put it behind a Paywall, it was like Vimeo on demand or something and he was charging $5 for people to see it, I think you would get a lot of grief over that. And it's just a very odd situation where we were in certain contexts and the widest possible context online. We have trained ourselves to expect things for free and yet the only way free is possible is this increasingly insidious ad model that is gaming people's attention. And in certain contexts it's innocuous. I don't have not against ads across the board, but in others it just feels like this is the problem we want to figure out how to solve. And yet even you voice the concern. If we put everything behind a paywall, then we have a real problem of people not being able to get access to content that we really do want to spread as widely as possible. Right? I mean, I heard your conversation with Jaron Lanier about this and it's interesting that he was sort of blaming the famous truncated Stewart Brand quote, information wants to be free, which always people leave off. But information also wants to be protected is the second half of that sentence. Apologies to Stewart. Yeah, but I don't think I look back at the early Internet and the reason why everything was free is because the Internet was a university based system. We were using Gopher and Veronica. It's these early previsual text only Internet search retrieval systems and you would download and share documents, but it was all university archives. It was free material. So because it was part of a nonprofit academic world, because people actually signed an agreement before they went on the net saying, I promise I'm using this for research purposes. I'm not going to do anything commercial on here. I'm not going to advertise anything. You actually signed an agreement. It set up expectations of a very different place. The Internet really was intended at that point to become a commons. Then once we brought business on, businesses really leveraged and exploited that freeness. The sense that everybody wanted things to be free without ever really bringing forward that sort of academic ethos along with it and it created a real mess. And then I remember the moment that I really thought it would change and maybe it did, was when Steve Jobs did his iPad demo and he was sitting in this big easy chair and showing a different posture and the iPad worked differently. The iPad, you couldn't just kind of download files the way you did with your computer. Now you were going to go through an itunes store to look at stuff. And I feel like what he was trying to do almost with the skill of a neurolinguistic programmer. He was trying to anchor this device in a different social contract between the user and the content maker. And to some extent it worked, at least in the Apple universe. He said, look, it's going to be easier and better to buy something through itunes than to go play around on Napster just collecting music for the sake of it. Yeah, well, part of it is once you move to digital and people understand that there's zero marginal cost in producing the content right, and that their use of a file doesn't prevent anyone else from using that same MP3 or whatever it is, at least psychologically. That seems to be one of the reasons why there's this expectation that free is the actual ethical norm and they're okay with that. First they came for the musicians and I said nothing. Then they came for the cab drivers and I said nothing, and then once they come for me so the thing that people are upset about is not that they're ruining all these other people's jobs and taking all this stuff. The thing that they worry about is, well now my privacy is being invaded, so now I'm going to get up in arms about what's happening here, or now my job is in danger, so now I'm going to get upset about that. Yeah, well, people speak specifically of what it's like to be a writer. Recently, an article, I think it was an op ed in The New York Times. It might have been the Washington Post. But in the last couple of weeks, talking about the economics of writing and how dismal they've become and it's amazing. I've had some sense of this for some time, but to read these stats was fairly alarming. The average professional writer who's making some portion of his or her living from writing is living below the poverty line. And even you have to be a massive outlier in terms of just not even an ordinary bestseller to make a very good living from writing. And for the most part, professional writers have to have other jobs. Most professional writers who turn out a book every year or two or three have professorships or they have something else that's paying the bills and that's not an optimal world to live in, especially when you throw in journalism there, which is massively underfunded. And ironically, we're living to some degree in a recent heyday of journalism because of how awful Trump is. Still, there's a kind of winner take all effect there where you have the New York Times and The Atlantic doing well and, and then everyone else still going slowly or quickly bankrupt. How do you view journalism and the life of, of a writer at this point? It's, it's harder. You know, I'm, I'm lucky in that, you know, when I wrote my first books in the early ninety s, it was still the end of the golden period for authors where I would write a book that sold a lot less than my books do now but my publisher would send me on airplanes on a book tour. I'd stay in the author's suite of hotels. And they had these special suites that we would go to at fireplaces and the books of all the people who had stayed in it before. And you'd get this person called a media escort who would take you to your events in the different towns, who was also being paid somehow, who was also being somehow right. And then whatever Viacom buys Simon and Schuster which buys each of the little publishers and all the slack and went out of the wheel somehow. They started to use just much more accurate spreadsheets and all the wiggle room that we had in publishing. It was an industry that somehow just kind of got by about at the same size. I guess for a few centuries, it just sort of worked. And we lost the ability to kind of fudge our way through that. And they started to demand better margins and more of a squeeze and yeah, the power law dynamics of the internet then came into it. So it's better for a publisher to sell a Taylor Swift's autobiography and sell half a million copies of that than 40,000 copies of a book that's going to actually change the way people think and it's tricky. I decided to get my PhD late. I got my PhD when I was 50 or 49 and that was right after the 2007 crash when all the publishers were asking for books that could help business people one way or another. Every book I wrote was supposed to have a business self help aspect to it. So I got a university job so that I could write books like Programmer be Programmed in Present Shock or Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus these ones or this one team Human which are books promoting humanism and I don't have to worry as much about whether I sell 5000 or 50,000 copies. But it's it's sad. I've done university lectures where college students a common question I've gotten is why should journalists get paid for what they do? If I could blog as easily as them so they've almost lost all touch with the other there's so much in that. It's one of the more terrifying questions I've heard. Yeah it's frightening. I mean the way I answer it now is well if governments and corporations can spend billions of dollars on propaganda don't you want someone who has enough money to spend a couple of weeks deconstructing what you're being told? It makes no sense. If I had to list my fears around what technology is doing to us the erosion of the economics of journalism is one and also just the distortion of their incentives. I mean the fact that even our best organs of journalism are part of the clickbait logic and it's. Incentivizing all the wrong things. But what we want, we should be able to reverse engineer this. We know we want smart people to be well compensated for taking months to really fully explore and vet topics of great social importance. And so the question is, how do we get there? And the idea that someone could take months to write the best piece that has been written in a decade on the threat of nuclear war, say, right, and that that could just sink below the noise of Kim Kardashian's latest tweet. In a similar vein, our president's latest tweet and just disappear from a news cycle and therefore earn comparatively little ad revenue. And the net message of all of that is that those kinds of journalistic efforts don't pay for themselves and that we really don't need people to hold those jobs because we can't figure out how to pay them. That's very scary to me. Yeah. And it should be. And we do see a few networks or cooperatives, like the journalists who put together the Panama Papers, and we see some response to that. I don't like the opposite alternative where it started to feel like, to me anyway, coming up, that the the journalists who got the the well, who got the biggest platforms, tended to be people who were paid well enough by the system not to challenge neoliberalism. It's like, well, if you pay the journalists enough, then they're going to support the system. As it is, they'll drink martinis and shut up. So now that it's getting harder and harder for journalists to make ends meet, I feel like a little bit of them there might be a little bit of a positive effect in terms of at least in terms of their politics. And they're looking at saying, oh, now I'm a gig worker, now I'm in precarity, and there's something valuable to not being able to just graduate an Ivy League school and get to write books for the rest of your life. Well, what do you do with the fact that this seems to be the counterargument, is that people want what they want, and it's not an accident that certain media products get tens of millions of views and certain others just sink beneath the waves, no matter how valid or valuable the content is, right? So if it's just a fact that only 8000 people in the United States really want to read the next white paper about climate change, well, then you can't monetize that white paper, because people just don't care about climate change now. They should care about it. And we have to keep trying to figure out how to make them care about it. But if they don't care about it, given the glut of information, given the fact that, again, you can just binge watch Game of Thrones for the third time, and you can't stop people from doing that, this is just a kind of fool's errand to figure out how to get them to take their medicine. On some level, what we're saying is that if it can't be made interesting enough and titillating enough so as to actually survive competition with everything else that's interesting and titillating, well, then maybe it deserves to sink. Even if that is selecting for the kardashians of the world and varying important stories. It's interesting. I make the same sort of argument in Team Human when I'm kind of defending the work of David Lynch against the more commercial kinds of movies and the way that Hollywood will use that argument. They'll say, well, look, people in the mall, they want to see the blockbuster with the spoiler and the climactic ending. They don't want to see the thing that makes you think they don't want the strange. But I think people do, deep down want that. I do think people want to experience awe, and they want to engage with paradox and with ambiguity and with depth. What makes me so annoyed with Netflix is that you can't talk about a Netflix show with someone else because you'll be on season three, episode seven, and they're on season two, episode one, and you're going to spoil something for them. Because these shows themselves are basically timelines of IP, of little IP bombs, the little spoilers that show up every three or four episodes. It's like the value of the thing, and you keep undoing them. It's, oh, Mr. Robot, he is his father. Or each one of them has these almost stock reversals, and you look at real art. What's the spoiler in a David Lynch movie? I couldn't even tell you what it was about after I've seen it twice anyway, even though I've loved it. But the idea that we should deliver what people want because this is this is what they're they're paying tickets for doesn't really make sense when the whole thing has been has been contextualized that way. And in other words, I don't think that's what people really want so much as that's what we're being trained, or that there are shows that almost open up wonder, or that almost make deep arguments, or books that make quasi deep arguments, but then just solve everything at the end. There is a right answer. So in a show I don't know if you saw that Westworld show on HBO, no, there is an answer. It's all these timelines that are all over the place, and then you find out, oh, these were different timelines, and this happened then, and this happened then, and this happened now, and it's just a kind of a postmodern Pyrotechnic, but it gets you to that same place where there is an answer. And every article we write is supposed to have, yes, therefore you should take Echinacea or don't take Echinacea, or vote for Trump, or don't vote for Trump. This need to give people the conclusion as if, well, I'm not going to pay you for an article or a book. If you don't give me the answer by the end, I'm not going to watch your movie unless everything works out by the end. And that's in some ways, the most dangerous aspect of this cultural collapse that we're in, that everything has to have an answer or every effort has to have a utility value that's recognizable at least by the time you've done this thing. Because you can't reduce all human activity, all writing, all product, all culture to its utilitarian value. And this is where I get into that weird, mythic religious place that I'm still uncomfortable speaking out loud, but I just read a reread Horkheimer. He wrote this book, The Eclipse of Reason, and he was talking about the difference between reason with a capital R, the real reasons, the essential human values we do things versus the small R utilitarian reasons we do things. And what I'm really trying to do is stress that human beings have capital R reasons for things, that there is something more going on here that meets the eye. And I don't just mean some magical other dimension, but some essential value to to human camaraderie, to establishing rapport, to being together, to looking in someone's eyes. It's not I mean, yes, it's the mirror. Neurons fire and the oxytocin goes through your bloodstream and your your breathing rate sink up. And this is the stuff that you studied, you know, and and and there's an evolutionary small R reason to establish rapport, but is there another one? Is there a value, is there a meaning to this? And that's the part I'm not willing to give up. That's the big argument that I guess the real thing I'm in now is the argument with the Transhumanists or the Posthumanists or the Singularitans who really believe that technology is our evolutionary successor and we should pass the torch to technology because tech will not only write a more factual article and a more utilitarian program, but tech is more complicated. It's a more complex home for information than the human mind. So we should pass the torch. And when I say no, that human beings are special and I start talking about awe and meditation and camaraderie and establishing rapport, I mean, the one that the famous transhumanist, I'll leave him nameless. I was on a panel with him and he said, oh, Rushkov, you're just saying that because you're a human. As if it was hubris for me to argue this, to argue for humanity. And that's when I decided, okay, I'll be on Team Human. I'll make a bet that there's something important here because without that as a starting place, I find it hard to make any of the arguments that we're making, whether they're against the market or against automation or against all of our stuff being for free or the collapse of quality or just giving in to consumerism. It seems that I have to hold up some sort of essential human value that needs to be recognized rather than surrendered so readily. Well, I guess there are two different kinds of surrender or blurring of the border between the human and what might be beyond. I guess you could talk about artificial intelligence replacing us or augmenting us. I know you touch if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I bring you a conversation with a person who agrees with me, and I with him on this point. David from is going to walk us through current events once again. There is just no way to keep up with the cascade of scandals. We had this conversation a day before Trump announced that he would be pulling us out of the Paris Climate Accord. I think I will reserve comment about that for a future podcast. I'm sure I'll have a climate change expert on at some point to talk about this. Let's just say it's another way in which Trump seems to be forcing our country into a kind of exile among developed nations. It's as though his only goal is to diminish our stature in the world. But David and I spoke before all that. David, as you recall, he's a senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine. He's a former speechwriter for George Bush, and he's someone who's been unusually clear eyed about the problem of Trump in office. So I bring you David from I am here once again with David From. David, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for having me. What a pleasure. As I was saying to you offline, you are a true road warrior here. You were doing this interview from an airport. You have found a reasonably quiet corner of a lounge. So I apologize in advance for any imperfections in the sound we're going to be treating our listeners to. So thanks for doing this. And we are jumping into another conversation about politics to the consternation of the, I think, small percentage of my listeners who are diehard Trump supporters. I want to start, as I attempted to start my last conversation with you, and I think I do this really every time I touch the subject. Now, I want to attempt to anchor this to some basic understanding that partisanship is not what is motivating this conversation. I think there are a few simple moves we can make to at least establish that to a moral certainty for any reasonable person in the audience. And one is to say that the implication of everything we're going to say that is probably urging impeachment proceedings along is that we are eager to have a President Mike Pence right. So that this is not we're not talking about a choice between Trump and hillary. Now we're talking about everything we say that suggests he's unfit for office, is ushering in a Republican replacement, and one who I'm really not at all sanguine about, given my concerns about the influence of religion in politics. And perhaps there are other ways to do it, but that is that is a fairly simple one. Can you think of anything to say apart from just referencing your obvious background as a Republican that can cut through this this allegation of partisanship? Before we start, the rule I try to follow, don't always look up to it by try is no arguments about arguments. So somebody will make a point. Comedian should not make a sketch about the assassination of a president. Twitch response will be not to engage with that, but to say, well, did you comment in a similar way about a situation that I personally believe is to be analogous? And you get this infinite regress where arguments turn into arguments about arguments. So with the present president, your statements about him are either true or false. And you may have good or bad motives, but they're either true or false. So it's either true or false that he's behaving in a certain way, that he's a man of certain character, that he's doing certain things to our alliance structure, or it's not. And these constant attempts to sort of go to the argument behind the argument, I think in the case of Trump in particular, that they are desperation moves. Trump is a very hard person to defend on the merits. So it's hard to say that. It's hard to acquit him on the Russia matter. It's hard to suggest that he is a person who lives up to the ethical and character standards that we've accepted of past presidents. And so you get these moves where they say, well, let's not talk about him. Let's talk about you. Frankly, I'm not that interesting, so I don't think anybody wants to talk about me. We want to talk about Donald Trump, who's the most powerful man in the world and probably one of the more interesting men in the world. Okay, yeah, well, I think that's good enough. I went out on Twitter a couple of hours ago asking for the hardest and most sane questions in defense of Trump for us. And honestly, I didn't get much. I will read some of those questions. Many of them focus on the problem of information siloing and fake news. And it is alleged that you and I are the victims of fake news and conspiracy theories. The whole Russia conspiracy is a conspiracy theory. I can come up with a much better argument in his defense. I'd love to hear it. What's prop him up for me? Okay, well, this is not an argument, actually, exactly in defense of him, but it's an argument that works his defense, which is, all of the disturbing things we know are many of the disturbing things we know about him. We know because people entrusted with public secrets have broken their oaths and released into the public domain information that is meant to be private within the government. And this information often involves real compromising of really important secrets. The Russians are not babies. The Russians do not have their important conversations on open lines. They have their conversations on lines by modes that they believe to be secure. So every time that somebody from the NSA or CIA or National Security Council releases something about what the Russians are saying with Trump or about some conversation between the Trump camp and the Russians, they reveal to the Russians that something the Russians had thought was secret is not, in fact, secret. And that is a real loss to the United States. And what somebody might say to me is, you are very angry at Edward Snowden and Bradley Chelsea Manning for betraying secrets. Here are secrets being betrayed. Why aren't you equally angry? That's the best argument. I view that as the way in which our political norms are eroding under what I'm increasingly viewing as a failed pressure testing of our system. The fact that you and I can be sanguine and even greedy with respect to leaks of classified intelligence that do our society harm. I would say I'm not sanguine about this. I mean, I think one of the tragedies of the Trump presidency trump's advent of the presidency is itself a terrible blow to the institutions of the United States and the things that society is having to do in an effort to defend itself against him, which may or may not ultimately be successful. I'm not saying that Trump won't ultimately prevail over these institutions, but themselves come with terrible costs. No, I was granting that. I'm saying I want those leaks to continue because I think Trump is so bad. But no, I'm not downplaying the cost at all. I think it's fairly terrifying that we're in this position. Look at what's happened with give you another example of the cost, the action of the courts in striking down Trump's. I don't know. Are we allowed to call it a Muslim ban? Yes, you can read the fine print on that. Yes, let's call it that, a Muslim ban. He's Muslim. Ban. The courts are these judicial decisions I mean, I think I basically agree with what they're trying to do, that you can say these actions by the president are obviously capricious. They're obviously motivated by animus. They're obviously stupid and irrational. However, the precedent's authority over immigration is plenary that these are. He is clearly acting within what would have been thought of as his rights until six months ago because he's so flagrantly using this power for ill and for malice and without a basis in an indiscriminatory way. The courts are telling him he can't do it, but the courts are overstepping. Let me give you one more example of a price of Trump, and this is maybe the most serious one of all. Everyone's laughing over this funny fake tweet that he did last night. The mangled thing that then it was a typo and it stayed out for 6 hours. Okay, so what it looked a lot like happened like was the President was tweeting while falling asleep, had some kind of spasm with his fingers, tweeted something nonsensical passed out so he didn't notice it and nobody found him for 6 hours or noticed the tweet or did anything about it. That's very amusing. While it can happen he's older man, maybe he takes sleeping pills. This is a man who also has a power with his other fingers to launch a nuclear war. We all are wondering whether the people who execute his commands would take an order from Donald Trump about a nuclear war in the same obedient way they would take an order from a Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. And I think we all kind of hope that they wouldn't. But what do we call societies where military people don't defer to the civilian leadership? Banana republics? What do we call them? Yeah, right. The point is that we are not coming out of this hole. However the story ends, we are going to have major losses for our institutions. Yeah, well, so let's talk about how the story might end. I want to talk about the Russia investigation. But first let's talk about some of these losses we've already noticed. How is Trump's foreign policy going? He just got back from this trip and I noticed that you reacted to the McMaster oped which seemed to rescind just what it really has been a multigenerational vision of a world where established democracies cooperate in ways that aren't guided by narrow self interest. And apparently we're no longer into that in the world. Before World War II, countries behaved like selfish entities and they regarded the world as basically a competitive enterprise. The United States, the other great powers, small powers too, it was a cab Asian world of all against all. And after World War II, our parents and grandparents decided we're not doing that anymore. And what we're going to do is this is this can't apply to the whole planet. Was there a lot of authoritarian regimes? There are a lot of backward societies. But among the advanced democracies we're going to build new kinds of structures where international politics begins to look a lot like domestic politics. So if an American company and a German company have a dispute that gets settled in more or less the same way as if two American companies had a dispute. If, if there's even a trade dispute between the German and American government or between the United States and the EU, that gets settled in a way that looks a lot like a domestic. There's that there are set of rules that are agreed upon in advance by the two sovereigns. The rules are then arbitrated by a neutral adjudicator that arbitration is binding, and you can then enforce it inside the court system of either country from in this zone of peace and cooperation that's the NATO countries, plus Japan, plus Australia, New Zealand, plus a few others, international and domestic politics, blur to a great example. I regard that as one of the most signal political accomplishments of the human race. So the Trump people went to Europe and they said, as far as we're concerned, that's over. We regard the countries of Europe and we don't first, we don't even acknowledge there is such a thing as the EU. And we regard the countries of Europe as power competitors in exactly the same way that we would regard Russia or China or Uzbekistan or Congo, and we call you our friends. But we think our relationship is regulated entirely by interest, not by values and interests in the most short sighted way. So when we have a trade dispute, we go to bat for the American company. We don't ask the question who's right? Or how do we sustain a long term regime? We just say, our guys, our guys win, your guys lose. Mike makes right. The stronger imposes his will on the weaker, and we're counting on ourselves to be the stronger for a long time to come. Here. You have a great passage in this op ed quote. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the Trump presidency is the way even its most worldly figures, in words composed for them by its deepest thinkers, have reimagined the United States in the image of their own chief selfish, isolated, brutish, domineering, and driven by immediate appetites rather than ideals or even long term interests. And I think that just puts it perfectly. It really is. This is the character of our country, too, which should be our greatest concern, but the way in which defenders of Trump have to basically I mean, you put it this way in a tweet people who defend Trump become just like Trump. And, you know, I said something similar a few days before, just watching how otherwise serious people with I mean, the most serious people in his administration, the people who we were relieved to see appointed, because finally there are a few grown ups at the table. You have them just jettison their credibility and their ethical gravitas insofar as they could maintain it for an hour. In the current administration, they just perform a kind of moral self immolation trying to defend him. They immediately start lying or speaking orwellian euphemisms. Just the sickness spreads. That's one of the most worrying things about what's happening in Washington right now. I agree. And the tragedy of McMaster this is happening with HR. McMaster. In his case, it really is like an opera, because I'm sure he took the job with a view to minimizing the harm, the harm that Donald Trump would do. And I'm sure in all kinds of ways that we won't know for 2030 years. He is minimizing the harms that Donald Trump would do. I'm sure he's playing a very public spirited role and sacrificing his own reputation in the process, which is kind of noble in a way. But at the same time, he is called on to tell lies about petty things, and he's doing it. So, one more question on foreign policy here, because this genuinely surprised me, and I'm sure there's some way of seeing it where it would just have been obvious he would behave this way. But I was not expecting Trump to behave the way he did with the Saudis, where he really just became like a lispiddle to the Saudi regime. He talked tough during the campaign. You can see tweets of his where he talks about their abuse of women and human rights and their responsibility for terrorism and exporting the Wahhabi worldview to the ends of the earth. He seemed to be aware of just how beyond the pale, much of what they do is and has been for a long time. And yet he didn't make a peep about this and then singled out Iran as though they were the true engine of jihadist terror. Can you explain what happened there? I can't, actually. I'm sure there is an explanation. I don't have the information to assess how much of this is driven by crass business dealings, how much of this is driven by the ideology of the people around him, how much of this is driven by certain kinds of domestic political considerations that he trump? Balances a lot of the pretty obvious antisemitism in his entourage with kind of championing of the foreign policy views of certain parts of the right wing of the Jewish community. Some of that may be in play there. There may just be, by the way, sluffinliness and lack of attention, where because he was flattered that he got dragged into endorsing the Saudi side of an internal sectarian war in the Islamic world. I can't assess all of those things. And look, there are also serious reasons why the United States will go and has gone easy on Saudi Arabia and will continue to do so, so long as oil remains an important fuel. One of the things I think is sort of exciting by the time we live in there are a lot of bad things is within the life of the younger listeners to this podcast. I think that day they will see the end of that day, but I don't think I will. That's something we should be going full speed ahead on, obviously. Okay, so the Russia investigation, how is that going? I was going to have you on the episode I did last week with Anne Applebaum and Juliet Kym, but then we had scheduling issues and your interview got pushed like, another 36 hours in the future. And the news was changing so fast that I got the sense that if we just waited a few more days, all of a sudden we would be in a completely different news cycle with new facts to worry about. And indeed that has happened since I had that conversation with Anne and Juliet. We now have Kushner and his back channel, as well as the ham fisted response to that disclosure on part of the administration. So talk to me about how things are going now in this investigation. Well, Anne, of course, has always been a great teacher of mine. So people who got to hear her, I think really I know how much I've benefited from her wisdom on these issues over the years, and I hope that your listeners would agree with me about that because she really has been at tremendous personal risk. I don't and doesn't tend to talk about this, but she has herself been a target and her family of Russian active messengers and disinformation, and it has taken a terrible price from her. And she's not one to complain about it, but it's true and needs to be recognized. Yeah, she's fantastic. On the Kushner matter, we still don't know exactly what happened. I think it's important in all of these cases not to get ahead of the story because you can see how rumor can easily overspread and you can disillusion people that they expect bigger news than they get. And I think we all need to be very cognizant of the terrible, terrible example of Louise Mitch, who is just I don't know if people listen to this podcast or wherever, but Louise Mitch, she was a British Conservative member of Parliament. She's had a very exotic career in a lot of ways, and the latest she's no longer in Parliament and the latest chapter of her career, she's become a disseminator of the inverse of RT. If there were an anti RT that is very anti Russian in its tone but just like RT in its method, in its total disregard for knowledge and fact of making up stories and circulating wild rumors in this struggle for the character of the country. Being careful with what you know and being careful about what you say is an important moral principle, not just a prudential principle. You don't want to be like the people who abuse the credibility of their audience. So I'm waiting to see if is the story what is the dimension of this story? We've heard many explanations of what could have happened. I have to tell you, the answers that come from the Kushner's spinners don't sound very plausible. The idea that the president's son in law with no military experience proposed to go into a Russian compound, have a secure conversation about military dispositions in Syria, we have an entire Pentagon. If anyone is going to talk about, well, how do we make sure that we avoid plane crashes? It's not going to be Jared Kushner. It's going to be the people in the Pentagon. And they have lots of ways of communicating with their Russian counterparts and in ways that are much more secure both technically and also making sure that you don't reveal more than you want to reveal. So that story doesn't seem right. On the other hand, the darkest version of the story, which is that Kushner was seeking some kind of personal financial advantage, which was suggested by a Bloomberg report. We don't know that to be true either. There are some stray hints about that, but that shouldn't be taken as written. All we know is the story is exceedingly strange, very difficult to justify and there has been no credible effort to justify it. And it is behavior that if not justified, should lead to the loss at least of a security clearance and maybe outright resignation and possibly even harsher sanctions. Yeah. And the effort to justify that I've seen most commonly is that it relies on equivocating on this term back channel, the claim that back channels are kind of standard operating procedure as though this sort of back channel is equivalent to the other kinds of back channels people are talking about. That is a truly specious move, isn't it? Yeah, well the people who make this point are they throw out this word as if we know what it means and if they know what it hits it. What is a back channel? That term gets applied to two kinds of conversations. The first is a conversation where in an effort to explore with an adversary, the government of the United States will send somebody who is connected to the adversary, but deniable by the United States. A business person, a retired military person, somebody who if the conversation goes wrong, the United States can say hey, he was just gassing, he wasn't talking for the mission impossible. If your mission fails, of course the Secretary will deny any knowledge. So the first reason you have a back channel is in order to have deniability. So Jared Kushner would be the absolute last person in the world you would choose to set up a back channel of that kind because he's obviously acting for the President undeniably. So the second kind of back channel that you get is the kind of back channel that the Obama administration had at the beginning of its approach to Iran, which is in an effort again to explore what is possible, you set up a three way conversation. In that case the intermediary was a man. The United States would talk to the government of Oman, the government of Oman would talk to the government of Iran and messages would be sent back and forth that way. And only after a certain point would the conversation become more direct between the United States and Iran that some preconditions were dealt with first. I'm not endorsing by the way, the Obama Iran policy, but this is how it worked. Now it's not impossible that the Trump people broke through those rules and norms and tried to do it a different way. But you just can't get past the fact that he went to them. Let me give you one last example drawn from American history about how these things work. Henry Kissinger, when he was National Security Adviser, had an informal set of contacts with the then Russian Ambassador of the United States, a guy named Dobrenna. Dobrenan would come to Kissinger first at the NSC. First they would meet in various neutral places, and then ultimately, when Kissinger became Secretary of State, he would come to the State Department. In fact, he even had a reserved parking space at the State Department, which is a big bone of contention. But the point was, there was no question about the security of their conversation. One of the big questions that we have about this is did Kushner not understand that he was putting himself in a position where the Russians could generate a transcript of his talk, alter that transcript in various embarrassing ways and release that, or use that as a weapon against him? He was putting his head inside their noose. Did he not understand it? Why was he doing it? What motive could have been so strong, or was he so stupid as to have taken such a terrible risk for himself and his administration, or his administration to be? They were yet in office. So now what do you expect of the coming comey testimony? I keep using a wine story. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org you./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, today's topic is a topic we all think about while doing our best not to think about it. The topic is death, and how we think about death changes depending on whether we're thinking about dying ourselves or about losing the people we love. But whichever side of the coin we take here, death is really an ever present reality for us. And it is so whether we're thinking about it or not, it's always announcing itself in the background, on the news, in the stories we hear about the lives of others, in our concerns about our own health, in the attention we pay when crossing the street. If you observe yourself closely, you'll see that you spend a fair amount of energy each day trying not to die, and has long been noted by philosophers and contemplatives and poets. Death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing. Just take a moment to reflect on how you've spent your day so far, the kinds of things that captured your attention, the things that you've been genuinely worried about. Think of the last argument you had with your spouse. Think of the last hour you spent on social media. Over the last few days, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find a new font for my podcast. This has literally absorbed hours of my time. So if you had stopped me at any point in the last 48 hours and asked me what I'm up to, what really concerns me, what deep problem I'm attempting to solve, the solution to which seems most likely to bring order to the chaos in my corner of the universe, the honest answer would have been, I'm looking for a font. Now, I'm not saying that everything we do has to be profound in every moment. Sometimes you just have to find a font. But contemplating the brevity of life brings some perspective to how we use our attention. It's not so much what we pay attention to, it's the quality of attention. It's how we feel while doing it. If you need to spend the next hour looking for a font, you might as well enjoy it. Because the truth is, none of us know how much time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present, or at least it can. And it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things. When you take something like road rage, this is probably the quintessential example of misspent energy. You're behind the wheel of your car and somebody does something erratic or they're probably just driving more slowly than you want and you find yourself getting angry. Now, I would submit to you that that kind of thing is impossible if you're being mindful of the shortness of life, if you're aware that you are going to die and that the other person is going to die and that you're both going to lose everyone you love. And you don't know when you've got this moment of life, this beautiful moment, this moment where your consciousness is bright, where it's not dimmed by morphing in the hospital on your last day among the living and the sun is out or it's raining. Both are beautiful and your spouse is alive and your children are alive and you're driving and you're not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. You're just running an errand. And that person in front of you, who you will never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about, but which, if you could know them, you would recognize are impressively similar to your own, is just driving slow. This is your life, the only one you've got. And you will never get this moment back again. And you don't know how many more moments you have. No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them in a way that they feel it and in a way that you feel it. And you've missed most of them. And you don't know how many more you're going to get. You've got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better place. You've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence. So why not relax and enjoy your life? Really relax, even in the midst of struggle, even while doing hard work, even under uncertainty. You are in a game right now and you can't see the clock. So you don't know how much time you have left and yet you're free to make the game as interesting as possible. You can even change the rules. You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet. You can make games that used to be impossible suddenly possible and get others to play them with you. You can literally build a rocket to go to Mars so that you can start a colony there. I actually know people who will spend some part of today doing that. But whatever you do, however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life and an awareness of death is the doorway into that way of being in the world. And there are very few people who are more aware of death and the lessons it has to teach us than my guest today. Today I'm speaking to Frank Ostaseski. Frank is a Buddhist teacher and a leading voice in end of life care. In 187, he co founded the Zen Hospice Project, which was the first Buddhist hospice in America. And in 2004, he created the Meta Institute to train health care workers in compassionate and mindful end of life care. And Frank has been widely featured in the media on Bill Moyer's television series, on our own terms, in the PBS series with our Eyes Open, on The Oprah Winfrey Show and in many print publications. He's been honored by the Dalai Lama for his work in this area, and he's the author of a new book, The Five Invitations discovering What Death Can Teach US about Living Fully. If you want more information about Frank and his work, you can find the relevant links on my blog. And I'm sure you'll hear in the next hour of conversation that Frank's is the voice of a man who has taken the time to reflect on the brevity of life. And a wonderful voice it is. So now I bring you Frank Ostaseski. I am here with Frank Ostevsky. Frank, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sam, nice to be with you. Thanks for having me. So we know many people in common. We were introduced by our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein, who was a very old friend of mine and one of my first meditation teachers. Was he a teacher for you as well? He was, as was Jack and Sharon in the early days and many of the other Asian teachers who came to town as well. So I had an introduction to that world of terabatan papasana practice, but also in Zen practice when I came to start the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, which was the first Buddhist hospice in America, actually. Nice. Well, I would definitely want to focus our conversation on death and dying, which is really your area of expertise. It's amazing that someone can be an expert in that, but you are certainly one of them. Just before we begin, tell people what hospice care is. So you could think of hospice care as something on a continuum of health care that is usually accessed when people are in the final six months to a year of their life. It's generally oriented toward comfort care, managing symptoms, controlling people's pain, helping people who have chosen not to necessarily pursue more curative. Therapies hospice care might happen in people's home or it might happen in a facility. And of course, now we're seeing a kind of blending of hospice care and what is called palliative care or comfort care that's even happening in acute care facilities. So what was different about Zen hospice? We did all the normal things that any other hospice would do. But we tried to add to that mix the component of mindfulness. We wondered what would it be like to bring together people who were cultivating what we might call a listening mind or a listening heart through meditation practice and people who needed to be heard at least once in their life, folks who were dying. And in our case, those folks were people who lived on the streets of San Francisco, at least initially. Now, was this during the AIDS epidemic? No, the AIDS epidemic was started around 1980 or so in San Francisco a little bit earlier. And this was in about the mid 80s. Right. So we were caring for both people with AIDS and also people with cancer. Mostly we were tending to people. That the system that kind of fell through the gaps in the system. How did you first get into this, and what was your first encounter with death? At what point in your life did you begin to have a more than average interest in contemplating death and using it as a lens through which to view your life and view how you could actually be of help to other people? Yeah, great question. Well, death and I got introduced early on. My mom died when I was about 16 and my dad a few years later. So death came into my life quite early. Buddhist practice, with its emphasis on impermanence, was another kind of path that helped me come toward this work. For a while, I worked in refugee camps in southern Mexico and Central America, where I saw a lot of horrible dying, actually, and was quite helpless to do anything about that at times. Then when I came back to San Francisco, the AIDS epidemic had just begun. We didn't even know what it was. Stephen Levine, who was a teacher and dear friend, was a big influence both on my own personal life, but also on the creation of his own hospice project. Much of what he did and taught influenced how we set up the hospice and how we cared for people. So, yeah, I think I was introduced to death really early on. And it wasn't so much that it wasn't just about the study of death. It was about how can we really be of service to people in their most vulnerable moments and what happens in that exchange. These days, of course, it's not just about how do we prepare for our dying. It's more about what can we learn from the wisdom of death that can help us live a full, happy, meaningful, rich life. I mean, to imagine Sam at the time of our dying, that we will have the physical strength, the emotional stability, the mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime. He's a kind of ridiculous gamble. And so I don't suggest that we wait until that time. I suggest that we reflect on these issues and reflect on this fact of our life now, and not so much so that we have a good death. I'm not even sure what that is anymore, but really so that we can really get how absolutely precarious this life is. And when we understand something about that, we come into contact with that directly in our bones. I think we also come into contact with just how precious this life is. And then we don't want to waste a moment. We want to jump in with both feet. We want to tell the people we love that we love them. So I think that this is really the great learning that's come to me from being with folks who are dying, which is that it's easy to take life for granted, and when we do, it's easy for us to get caught up in our neurotic concerns. And I think that's the beautiful thing about the beautiful legacy that I have from people who are dying. It really showed me what matters most. Yeah. Everything you just said can be valued in an entirely secular and atheistic context. Most people, given the nature of my audience who are hearing this conversation, will be fairly sure that when they die, that will be the end of conscious existence. And they will be certainly many of them reluctant to think about the significance of death in any form of otherworldly context. The idea that one would want to have a good death or be prepared to meet one's death for reasons that extend beyond the moment of death because they imagine there's nothing beyond the moment of death. And I must confess, I'm fairly agnostic on that point. I think that obviously there are good reasons to believe that when you're dead, you're dead. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what might happen after death. But I spend a lot of time thinking about death and about the shadow it casts back on the rest of life and the way in. Which that shadow can clarify life and cause us to to prioritize things that we will wish we had prioritized when our lives come to an end and whether that end comes by surprise or or in a way that's that's more orderly. I'm happy to talk about anything you may or may not believe about the global significance of death, but to focus for a moment on just what can be learned in the context of this life that doesn't presuppose belief in anything beyond it. What are the things that people are most confused about, most surprised by? What is waiting there to be discovered by someone who really hasn't thought much about death and has avoided thinking about it, frankly. And what is the value of learning those lessons sooner rather than later? Yeah, great question. I don't know. What happens after we die, Sam? I don't know. We'll find out, right? But I think that without a reminder of death, we tend to take our life for granted. And we become lost in these endless pursuits of self gratification, you know? But, you know, as I was mentioning, when we keep it close at hand, you know, at our fingertips I think it reminds us not to hold on so tightly. And I think we take ourselves and our ideas a little less seriously and I think we let go a little more easily. And what I find is that when there's a reflection on death we come to understand that we're all in the boat together. And I think this helps us to be kinder and gentler to one another, actually. You know, the habits of our life they have a powerful momentum, right? They propel us toward right onto the moment of death. And so the obvious question arises what habits do I want to create? Not whether or not they'll give me a better afterlife, but here in this life, my thoughts are not harmless. My thoughts take shape as actions. And, you know, the old story. They develop into habits and harden into character. So an unconscious relationship with my thoughts leads me to reactivity. And I want to live a life that's more responsible and more, I want to say, clean. That's the best way I could describe it. Yeah. Living with an awareness of death is obviously an ancient spiritual practice. I mean, an admonition that one should do this dates back as far as Socrates and the Buddha and several books in the Old Testament like Ecclesiastes. I think all three of those are more or less contemporaneous with one another. But it must go back further than that. And so it's no accident that monks and renunciates and contemplatives do this very deliberately. They focus on death, and they live their lives. They seek to live their lives as though they could end at any moment and they're trying to prioritize those things that will be the things that make sense in one's last hour of life. Again, this is often framed by a kind of otherworldly belief, but certainly not always. And I remember Stephen Levine, who you just mentioned at one point decided to live a year consciously doing this consciously living a year as he would want to live a year if it were going to be his last year. And this it struck me as an amazing thing to do. But of course, he had more than one more year to live. In fact, I think he had at least 20 at that point. He died a couple of years ago. There's a bit of a paradox here because there are many things, many good things in life, not merely superficial things, that we can only engage, that we can only seek with real energy based on the assumption that we will live a fairly long time. And something like the decision to have a child or to spend five or more years on your next project. And in most cases, it is a safe assumption that we have at least an average span of time in which to do these things. How do you square that with this imperative that we not take life for granted and that we use the clarifying wisdom of impermanence in each moment insofar as we're able? Yeah, I think that one of the ways we can shift the conversation, even the one that you and I are having, is that it isn't all about preparing for my death. It isn't all about this moment at which I stopped breathing, but more about how do I live my life on an ongoing basis. I had a heart attack a few years ago, and one of the things I did after that heart attack is I did some reading about other people who had heart attacks. And one of the people I met up on was Maslow. Maslow suffered a near fatal heart attack at one point in his life, and after which he wrote this beautiful thing. He said, the confrontation with death and the reprieve from it makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful, that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. He said, My river has never looked so beautiful. Death, in its ever present possibility, makes love, passionate love, more possible. Now, that's beautiful. It's not just about preparing for this final moment, but really looking and seeing. How does it what happens if these if we stop separating life and death, if we stop pulling them apart, we saw them as one thing. So for me, one of the things that does is help me really see the beauty of life. I mean, think about the cherry blossoms that cover the hillsides of Japan every spring, right? Or this place where I teach in northern Idaho, where there are these blue flax flowers that last for a single day. How come they're so much more beautiful than plastic flowers? Isn't it their brevity? Isn't it the fact that they will end that is part of their beauty. So I think that's true with our human lives as well. It's not like, Get ready, death is coming. Don't screw it up. It's more like, oh, how do I appreciate this? So, for me, being with dying is a lot, you know, has built in built up in me a tremendous sense of gratitude and appreciation for the fact that I'm alive. And so it isn't just about trying to cram for a test, this final test where we think we're going to pass, fail. I don't know what happens after we die. I don't know. We'll find out how it is. But what I do know and this is interesting, Sam, is that everybody's got a story about what happens after they die. And my experience is that that story shapes the way in which they die and in some ways, even the way in which they live their life. We could talk about that. And that's, you know, I I remember being with the president of the California Atheist Association who came to Zen Hospice to die. I was really proud that he came there, that he didn't feel anyone was going to push any dogma on him, that we weren't going to try and talk him into some kind of belief system, that it could go the way he needed it to go. It's not my job to convince him of something otherwise. It's my job to find out what's his vision? How does he need to go through this? Actually, I want to ask you about that because it has struck me more and more that secularists and atheists are really lacking resources to guide them both when they get sick and need to think about their own deaths or confront the deaths of those close to them. It just is a fact that there isn't a strong, familiar secular tradition around how to perform a funeral. Right? Who do you call when someone close to you dies? No matter how atheistic you are, many people are left calling their rabbi or their priest or just asking them to dumb it down, because the only people who know how to perform funerals and the only language around these moments in life, it's just explicitly framed by religion, and it needn't be. I mean, you know, I did hundreds of memorials for people through the AIDS epidemic, you know, and most of them had no you know, as you say, some of them had an early religious training, and we can talk about how that influences the way in which we die, by the way. So we had to create things. We had to draw ritual. You know how it is with ritual. Ritual has this way of bringing forward the truth that's already there in the realm. In a way, true ritual, different than ceremony, evokes something fundamental in us. We could say it might draw on an ancient wisdom or some ancient practice, but really it's about how do we evoke the truth? That's right here, right now. That's often what characterized a lot of the memorial services that I did. But one of the things that I saw with people, whether they had religious training or not, one of the things that really mattered most to them was relationship. What's their relationship with themselves, with the people that they cared about in their lives, with reality, however we might define that. And so one of the tickets in, if you will, or one of the paths in for people who even had sworn off religion years ago was some sense of interdependence, we might call it, or connection is a better way to say it, that was there. That was their religion. I could share hundreds of stories with you about people who had no religious training at all but loved their time in nature. And so we would work with that. We'd work with that experience as a way of helping them ease into the mystery of what happens in dying. Look, dying is we know at least this much. We know that dying is much more than a medical event, you know, and so the profundity of what occurs in the dying process is too big to fit into any model, whether that's a medical model or a religious model. It's too big. It shakes us loose of all of our all the ways we've defined ourselves, all the identities we've carried over all these years. They're either stripped away by illness or they're gracefully given up. But they all go and then who are we? And I think these are questions that people wrestle with in the time as they come closer to the end of their lives. Of course, if they have some religious or spiritual training, it influences that exploration. But it comes up for people anyway. Even those people who think dying is a dial tone where there's nothing that happens. Even then, the reflection on their relationships and how they've conducted those relationships is really important. I mean, this really big question at the end of people's lives is usually something not like is there life after death? But it's something more like am I loved? And did I love? I'm always struck by the asymmetry between dying and having others die. I mean, obviously I haven't died, so I don't know firsthand what that's like. But having lost people close to me and seen other people go through this experience, it is different being the one dying. And obviously the person who dies loses everyone. But here she also loses the experience of having to live with the with that experience of loss. And he or she doesn't have to live in a world where everyone is just carrying on as before and where a person's grief becomes a kind of embarrassment or something that other people have to figure out what to do with or navigate around in some way. Are there two sides of this? Is the death experience and the bereavement experience importantly different in any way? Yes, I think we could make some distinctions there that would be important. But I mean, remember that you say the person who's dying loses everything and so he or she going through this process is really going through some kind of way. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org. You./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. There have been many things in the news. There was the Pennsylvania clergy sex abuse bomb that went off this week, a grand jury report detailing the abuse of more than 1000 children by more than 300 priests over the years. And they're probably vastly more. That sort of thing is underreported, as we all know, and also sedulously covered up by the Church. In fact, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the Catholic Church is a machine, one of whose primary functions has been to ensure that children get raped and that the world doesn't find out about it. This really is not an exaggeration. It reminded me of an article I wrote about ten years ago when a similar scandal happened in Ireland. I wrote an article titled bringing the Vatican to justice. Actually, I may have read this on a much earlier podcast, but I'll just read the first two paragraphs here because it's really all I have to say in the present case, and it makes a point that I think is all too rarely made. So here's what I wrote I think in 2009 or so, I've paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Frankly, it has always felt unsportsman, like to shoot so large and langers a fish and so tiny a barrel, and there seemed to be no need to deride faith at its most vulnerable and self abased. Even in retrospect, it is easy to understand the impulse to avert one's eyes. Just imagine a pious mother and father sending their beloved child to the Church of a Thousand Hands for spiritual instruction, only to have him raped and terrified into silence by threats of hell. Then imagine this occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time, and to children beyond reckoning for over a thousand years. The spectacle of faith so utterly misplaced and so fully betrayed is simply too depressing to think about. But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my attention. Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible. The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature and consensual behavior is taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring instead that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy, or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution, one of the wealthiest on earth, that preferentially attracts pederass pedophiles and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock and their unwed mothers vilified wherever Church teaching holds sway, leaving boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to church run orphanages, only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery, set whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord. Okay, so that's how I opened that article. But let's be clear about what's happening here. This isn't just the law of large numbers, where you sample hundreds of thousands or millions of people and you find some thousands of them abusing children. There's something special about the Catholic Church. There's a specific machinery here based on dogmatism and faith in ridiculous ideas, and every detail matters, like the belief in hell and sin and celibacy and the shame of out of wedlock birth. Of course, there are other religious communities that have abused their kids and conceal the crime so as not to bring embarrassment to the institutions. There have been scandals among the Orthodox Jews in New York in recent years, but no one has perfected this horror show like the Catholic Church. This is an institution that routinely spends millions of dollars to protect individual priests who they know have raped children for decades, moving them from one parish to the next, where they can rape again, paying hush money to victims. And when these cases wind up in court, doing everything they can to shame and discredit the children or the adults who were once those children, this is pure evil, and the details are insane. I'm just going to read you a snippet from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report. This is a quote. Despite a priest's admission to assaulting at least a dozen young boys, the bishop wrote to thank him for, quote, all the good you have done for God's people, the Lord who sees in private will reward. End quote. Another priest confessed to anal and oral rape of at least 15 boys as young as seven. The bishop later met with the abuser to commend him as a, quote, person of candor and sincerity, and to compliment him for, quote, the progress he has made in controlling his, quote, addiction. When the abuser was finally removed from the priesthood years later, the bishop ordered the parish not to say why. Quote nothing else need be noted. End quote. This is further down here. In the report we came across a file in which the diocese candidly conceded that this quote is one of our worst cases, end quote. But of course told no one about him. Actually, we came across the statement in the files of several other priests. Then there was the file with a simple celebratory notation, quote bad abuse case. Victims sued us. We won. There was the priest, for example, who raped a seven year old girl after she'd had her tonsils out. This is me. Now. This girl was raped in her hospital room. Just picture the life of this person in the context of a faith so captivating that there was no recourse here. Picture the family around this girl. You get indoctrinated from birth into a cult. And this is a cult staffed with an inordinate number of pedophiles who gain access to your kids. Back to the report. Or the priest who made a nine year old give him oral sex and then rinsed out the boy's mouth with holy water to purify him. Or the boy who drank some juice at his priest's house and woke up the next morning bleeding from his rectum, unable to remember anything about the night before. OK, so that's as much as I'll give you. Sorry to ambush you with that, but it's hard even for me, to pay attention to this stuff and to remember how horrible these details are. None of this should be surprising. This is in the DNA of this organization. If you had to sign a user agreement for the Catholic Church, this should be part of it. Somewhere in the fine print. It should say, the ideology of our organization acts as a filter, attracting sexually confused and conflicted and conscienceless men. And we employ these people and hide their crimes. And we've done this for over 1000 years. Now. Give us your kids. Hearing that the Catholic Church is raping children should be as surprising as hearing that Google and Facebook are selling your data to third parties. Anyway, it's intense to read about all this. You're getting me just after I did that. Hence the top spin. Imagine if there were a Fortune 500 company that was raping and abusing children for its entire existence and systematically concealing it. What would we have done to that company? And now consider what hasn't happened to the Catholic Church. Okay, there have been many other things in the news. I can't bear to comment on Trump at the moment, but it's good to see people in the military coming out publicly in criticism of him after McRaven wrote his letter. And there was the Sarah Jong hiring at the New York Times. I think I'll talk about that with Jonathan Height, who's coming up this week. And then Jaron Lanier is finally coming up. That had to get rescheduled. So got some good podcasts on the horizon. I'm going to break now for my discussion of funding the podcast. As always, if you've heard it, you can skip it. It's seven minutes long. But if you haven't heard it or remain to be yet convinced to support the show, you might give it a listen, because it's on the basis of listener support that this thing works. Okay, back in seven. I'd like to explain why I don't run ads on the podcast and why I've decided instead to rely entirely on listener support. For those of you who haven't heard me talk about this, or for those who might be regular listeners but feel that I should run ads like every other podcaster, I'd like to explain my philosophy around funding this work. And you might find some of this surprising, because I actually do. Now, if you already support the show or you're just not interested to hear my thoughts on this, I'll make it very easy for you to skip this section. It's exactly six minutes and 45 seconds long, so you can just scroll ahead and enjoy today's episode. But for the rest of you, I'd like to explain my thinking. I don't want to run ads here, even for products and services that I love and use myself. And there are many reasons for this. For example, The New Yorker magazine recently inquired about sponsoring the show. I love the New Yorker. I've read it for 30 years. It's one of the best magazines on Earth. But it also, from time to time, publishes articles that are inaccurate or highly misleading, especially where science is concerned. And what listeners value most from this podcast is my effort to get at the truth. You want to know what I really think, and I don't want to create any incentives that could make it more difficult for me to simply tell you what I think. If I were taking a lot of money from The New Yorker, would I be free to say that one of his writers had just published something scandalously? Stupid? Maybe. But the point is, I don't want to have to think twice about whether something I think is important to say might upset a sponsor. And you don't want me to have to think about that either. My goal with this podcast is to create a forum for honest conversation of a sort that scarcely exists anywhere else. I want to talk about the most pressing issues of our time without looking over my shoulder and worrying about who might be offended. And there's no way I could do that while depending on ads. But that leaves us with a challenge of how to fund the show. Many of us regularly pay $3 for a cup of coffee, and we don't think twice about it. Yet it would suddenly seem onerous to pay $3 for something that actually brings us much more value than a cup of coffee ever could. I'm guilty of feeling this way myself, and frankly, it was until I started podcasting that I saw the situation from the other side and asking for listener support is something that I approached with real trepidation in the beginning. However, having done it, I've discovered that it's actually the most straightforward relationship I can have with an audience, and that really was a surprise to me. Just think about it. If you want to read one of my books, you have to buy that book before you even know whether you'll find anything of value in it. And if I want you to read one of my books, I have to convince you to buy it before either of us know if you'll find anything of value in it, that is a strange transaction, and it almost never reflects the actual value given or received. Plus, there are publishers and booksellers standing between us. There are people trying to get you to buy a book, and there are people trying to get me to sell it to you. But this podcast is free, so everyone can listen to it, which, for the purpose of spreading ideas, is the best situation possible. I'll reach more people within 24 hours of releasing the next episode of my podcast than I will over the course of a decade with my next book. And if some of you find this podcast valuable, then you can support it to the degree that you do find it valuable, which is the transaction that most honestly reflects whatever benefit you get from my work. And it's born of a direct connection between you and me. There are no third parties here with their own interests. Now, it's a problem that so many people expect to get podcasts and other digital media for free. We've trained ourselves to expect this by creating an Internet economy based on advertising. But advertising is not free, because these companies want some of your time and attention. That's what they're paying for. And every podcast that relies on advertising contains five or ten minutes or more where the host reads ads. So there's this cost to the host's honesty or perceived honesty. If I spent the first five minutes of every show trying to sell you a mattress, you could reasonably worry about whether my enthusiasm for it was sincere. But what else might I exaggerate if I'm willing to assure you week after week that memory foam will solve all your sleep problems? By self funding this platform together, we're creating one of the only forums that is truly free from the outside pressures that are conspiring to make honest conversation on hard topics so rare. Now, digital media is experiencing a race to the bottom, and the reliance on advertising is what is dragging it down. Most of what we're worried about with companies like Facebook and Google, the invasion of privacy, the undermining of our politics, the spread of misinformation can be directly attributed to their reliance on ad revenue. What we need is a new ethic and culture of sponsorship, where each of us takes the time to support work we value. Otherwise, the work won't get done or won't be nearly as good as it could be, and it will always be compromised by bad incentives. Even the best newspapers and magazines now resort to clickbait headlines and hit pieces designed to maximize traffic, because they have to sell ads against that traffic to survive. The result is absolutely toxic. Even the people at the pinnacle of mainstream media, people being paid tens of millions of dollars a year, can be fired over a tweet or because they express an unpopular political opinion, even on their own platform. Depending on what you do for a living, you might feel the same pressure yourself. What do you think is true, or might be true, or might be worth discussing with an open mind that could get you fired if said in the wrong context? I'm working to create a platform where I can think out loud about precisely those things with the smartest and most courageous people I can find, and I need your help to do this again. I totally understand the reluctance to pay for media online, and I feel it myself whenever I hit a paywall. But more and more, when I decide that there's something I value, I just automate my support for it. This is what I'm doing with other podcasts and blogs I follow that rely on audience support, and it's what I now do with charitable organizations like the Against Malaria Foundation. I don't want to have to keep rediscovering my commitment to saving kids from malaria. I just want to decide once and then know that I'm supporting this work at a level that I'm comfortable with. So for those of you who are regular listeners who derive value from my podcast, I want to encourage you to support the show at a level you're comfortable with. But I also want to be clear about one thing there are some of you who shouldn't support the show, no matter how much value you get from it. If it causes you any financial stress to give even a few dollars a month, then my appeal for listener support is not directed at you. For everyone else, please know that the small percentage of you who have begun funding the Waking Up podcast in a recurring way, whether monthly, through my website or on a per episode basis through patreon, or making it possible to keep the podcast going adfree. And if the show grows in interesting ways in the future, it will be because of regular contributions, even in small amounts, from listeners like you. So thank you. Okay, well, today's guest is Marty Hazelton. Marty is the world's leading researcher on how ovulatory cycles influence women's sexuality. She's a professor of psychology at UCLA and at the Institute for Society and Genetics. She's a former editor of the leading journal in the field, Evolution and Human Behavior, and she now directs the Evolutionary psychology lab at UCLA. Anyway, I had a great time talking to Marty. We talk about sex and gender and the role of hormones in human psychology, something she calls Darwinian feminism. We focus on the unique hormonal experience of women. But upfront. We talk about things like transgenderism and the Google memo and other controversial topics. This stuff is increasingly important, not only ethically, but politically cuts across many of the free speech concerns we've been airing on this show. So without further delay, I bring you Marty Hazelton. I am here with Marty Hazelton. Marty, thanks for coming on the podcast. Hi, happy to be here. So describe what you do. I should say at the top here, we'll be discussing your book Hormonal The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones. But how is it that you have come to write about hormones, and what is your particular academic perch? I would call myself an interdisciplinary evolutionary scientist, by which I mean some people would probably look at my work and say, oh, that's evolutionary psychology. I know what that is. But I think of myself as being a little bit broader than what is typically assigned to evolutionary psychology, if that makes sense. So I certainly have looked at phenomena that are well worn territory in evolutionary psychology, like mating relationships and so forth. But I've really also been interested in connecting the dots between using the evolutionary or adaptive logic to understand why humans do the things that they do and perhaps to get new insights into those things and test new hypotheses and actually look then at behavior and see what people are doing and describe that sometimes in some detail. But I'm also interested in the mechanisms in between, both the psychological mechanisms, which I think people who are interested in evolutionary psychology would recognize as straight up evolutionary psychology. But I've also do this work looking at hormonal moderators or hormonal mediators of the kinds of phenomena that we're interested in. And maybe this is too nitty gritty for your audience. I don't know. Please just tell me if you want me to they're nitty gritty people. Back off a little bit in terms of the technical detail. But I think it sort of puts me in this field of biological endocrinology or social endocrinology, but also behavioral ecologists. I, you know, reference their work. I look at I do a lot of comparative work in setting up my studies. So I look at the literature on nonhuman primates and on female animals who experience estrus all the way across the spectrum. So some of our insights actually come from looking at rodents. Humans clearly aren't rodents. Not all of them anywhere. Not all of them. Right. Except the rat. But, yeah, the comparative work also figures into my approach. So I want to sort of claim a broader base for understanding the particular social phenomena that I'm interested in, which mostly had to do with intimate relationships. Well, it is a fascinating and fraught intersection of disciplines, as you know. And I think I'm going to lead you onto some of that dangerous territory. There are several taboos here. There's this taboo around viewing the human mind in biological terms at all. And there's a related taboo around acknowledging sex differences. It's even taboo in some quarters to acknowledge that biological sex is even a thing. Yeah. And this leads us to what I think you consider to be mistaken notions of feminism. And in your book, you write about something called Darwinian feminism, right? So let's just pick a place to start here. Perhaps we should just start with the basic concern around understanding the human mind in biological and evolutionary terms. I don't think anyone at this point thinks that the logic of evolution subsumes every interesting question about what it's like to be us or what it is to have a human mind. But how do you view biology and psychology at this point? I think you kind of have to take it on a case by case basis for some things, like things that are linked with reproduction. And this perhaps is why this is such well traverse territory in evolutionary approaches, social scientific approaches. So thinking about reproduction so close to the engine of natural selection and therefore how our minds and the minds of our cousins, our nonhuman cousins, have been shaped, that seems very straightforward that there would now, that's not going to tell us everything. So we're not going to be able to derive from first principles everything that we want to understand about humans. And there are plenty of surprises, and I could give some examples of some of those, but you're asking me a more general question, which is the intersection between psychology and biology. I don't think that anybody who is credible could say that it's all biology, right? It's turtles all the way down because humans do things that are very uniquely human. And I think this is interesting both in response to as a potential response to your question, but also as one of the things that's tripped us up in gaining access to information that I think is important. So humans are undeniably their own kind of special species, right? We can drive Porsche. We can, you know, make Lattes. We can we speak multiple languages. We can read and write in those languages. We have a way of preserving cultural knowledge over time that has allowed us to technologically exploit our modern environment or our environment in general, to an extent that you just don't see with other species. So I think that seeing so that's just a really important thing to acknowledge. And any competent treatment of evolution and human behavior will include a large component that explores how those things happen, how they make humans unique, how they make the animal models or the more purely biological models inadequate as the full story. You know, of course, the the line between biology and culture is difficult to draw because much of culture has to be viewed as a kind of extended phenotype and we've evolved for some tens of thousands of years in the context of having linguistically based culture. Yes. And I think that there are some fascinating evolutionary psychological questions there. So we can ask the question, well, what are the kinds of things that humans bring when they are entering their social world? What are the kinds of things that they bring with them that help them acquire these useful bits of culture? So things like this is some work that was done at UCLA and continues to be done all over. It's gotten very popular. It's gotten very influential, I should say. And that is thinking about how we keenly observe different potential behavioral models and which of those models have behavior that is most likely to be repeated because they show some signs of success. Right. So I think that there are some really fascinating evolutionary psychological questions about what is the evolved machinery that we bring to our social world that allows us to practice, transmit, benefit from technology. Let's focus now on sex and gender because this is really where you have spent most of your time. First, I think the difference between sex and gender may not even be clear to most people. How do you define these terms? Yeah, well, I think that there's some disagreement about just exactly how we should define the terms. So I think of gender as being more of the sort of like continuous difference in masculinity and femininity. So you can occupy any number of different levels of relative femininity or relative masculinity, the things that we would recognize. So if we can think about masculine and feminine as what is gender typical, there is still a ton of variation between those gender typical central tendencies. I think it is most appropriate to and it becomes very awkward otherwise. It's most appropriate to refer to those things as gender. I read a paper, it's been a few years now, but I believe it was about mate copying, mate choice copying and guppies. And the guppies in the paper were referred to as having gender. And I just thought, okay, this is definitely not how I'm thinking of the appropriate definition of the word. But I think what it points out yeah, is that people are reluctant to use the word sex. Male, female. Right, that's what I was going to say. There's something awkward, not even socially, but just semantically or grammatically using sex in all of these sentences. And I'm sure that in the past I have used gender in many of these cases as a synonym for biological sex. Yes. And so I would tend to think of biological sex. So I teach a class, an entire year long freshman cluster course, the so called sex cluster. It's all about sex and gender. And in that class we dig deeply into these issues. But one of the things that we do is we sort of arrive at some common definitions and sex and gender. The difference between sex and gender is one of those. And so the way that we tend to think about sex and the way that I think about it is it's more like understanding what are those central tendencies of masculinity and femininity that we can identify as being sexually dimorphic characteristics of human beings. Now of course there are going to be exceptions, right? There are cases, fascinating cases of intersex. There's the question of sexual orientation which takes people away from those gender typical categories. And so there's still plenty of variation. But I tend to be comfortable with using the word sex referring to biological sex. So if we're talking about at the chromosomal level, if we're talking about on average differences in hormones, although even there things can get a little squishy. But then I think sex is really most appropriate and even somebody's identity, whether they identify as male or female, I would often be comfortable using the word sex there as well. Now that we're fully in the wilderness, let's just define some more of these terms. So intersex and transgender and non binary. Give me the electrom. So intersex people are born with a phenotype that is neither clearly male nor female in some important way. And so the classic case, I suppose, would be looking at babies who are born with genitalia that are neither clearly male nor female. So they have an intersex condition. Is there a chromosomal abnormality here? We're just talking about amounts of testosterone or not. It has lots of potential triggers. So humans when we are born there's sort of a female default to our phenotype. And then with the appropriate gene and hormone actions, you'll see sex differentiation, you'll see sex differences emerge between males and females in utero and well beyond, of course. And so at any of those levels something could be different during development. So whether it be at the chromosomal, whether you're Xx or XY and some Xx individuals will appear to be male in their phenotype so they're the genetic predictors. But then there are other things that could happen down the line that involve hormone levels and potentially also some environmental determinants, environmental trauma. That's the easiest case. Somebody who has a botched genital surgery and is that changed from male to female or vice versa would also potentially have an intersex identity fall into that category of intersex. What's really interesting, I think, and I think really pushes the boundaries of political correctness is to ask the question well, we know what's gender typical. Usually a male is attracted to a female, a female is attracted to a male. What about these very numerous voluminous cases of people who are attracted to members of the same sex or maybe or have bisexual attraction or maybe they just change their attractions over time? Do we think about that as a sort of intersex condition even though everything else about them might be very gender typical? Right before I wait into that. So non binary yes. Is a statement about a person's self perceived gender waiting? Yes. And so those may be people who have an intersex condition or who just want to not be in the gender binary. They are more comfortable being in between, perhaps not having people know anything about the biological foundations of their sex at some level. So these are people who will identify openly as queer. Often those people have same sex attractions, and so part of their queer identity will be breaking out of that binary with respect to who one is attracted to. There are lots of flavors in the sexuality rainbow, so to speak, for humans, and we're discovering even more of them as we move along. So that's queer or non binary. But then there are, of course, all of the different boxes that you might be able to check on a questionnaire about your sexual orientation. Yeah, the boxes are proliferating. Somebody I saw on Twitter a few months back took a picture of the beginning of, I think it was like the LSAT or some other standardized test where they were asked to check their gender and there was something like twelve boxes. Right. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. And maybe there need to be twelve boxes so that everybody's preference is acknowledged and respected. I know that it's bothersome to people who really prefer binaries and boxes and want to categorize the world in that way. And so we make people uncomfortable, I think, when we acknowledge that there are these variations. But I think it's really important to do just as a scientist who studies these topics that have real human relevance. So these students come into my class and they may be questioning their gender identity. They may have a lot of questions about how they are different in some way from others that they have noticed. And one of the things that I'm really proud of at my time here at UCLA is exploring those things, talking about them, and giving students a language to do both, to ask some questions about themselves, but also to sort of have their consciousness raised about these gendered issues in our everyday society. Well, I wasn't actually planning to start here, but now that we've opened Pandora's Box, let's just stay with these more esoteric questions before we get into just basic differences between men and women. So just to pivot back to the time bomb, it sounds like you armed for us. Is it a plausible thesis that homosexuality should be thought of in terms of intersex? Is that what you just suggested? Well, I think that we're really pushing the boundaries when we ask that question, and no doubt people will get quite irritated with me for having raised it. But I think that if what we mean by sex is gender typicality, and gender typicality is not hard for us to quantify. So on average, what are men like on average, what are women like? We respect the fact, of course, that in defining that, that there's a lot of variation. But as soon as we recognize that an individual is not fitting into that binary or not even really getting close to the on average male or female in certain aspects of their phenotype, then I think we ask the question, well, do we want to consider that to be an intersex case? I wouldn't say condition necessarily, because that medicalizes it a little bit too much. So as soon as we apply start being principled in our application of these definitions, then I think it leads us to these questions which, rightly, have made people quite uncomfortable. Well then what would you do with all the other just ambiguities of human sexuality or the varieties? So you have things that are, I guess, traditionally classed as paraphilia or something, that it's definitely nonstandard. If someone if you have a boot fetish or you have something that's not especially well subscribed, does that throw a wrench into any kind of paradigm where you would want to just think in terms of this single continuum? Well, I think that we might think about those cases as just different and so there's their own ingredients. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. So today we have my first live podcast officially in Seattle with Brett Weinstein. I introduce Brett on stage, but Brett is the biologist who is at the center of the Evergreen scandal, which you may have heard about. We don't go into as much details we might have because Evergreen is just an hour outside of Seattle, and many people in the audience were well aware of what happened there. It did make national news, and it was the most visible, apart from what happened to Nicholas Christakis at Yale, of these recent moral panics on college campuses. But briefly, what happened there is they traditionally had what they called a day of absence, where people of color would stay away from campus for a day to make their their absence felt. And Brett, as an extremely liberal and progressive member of the biology department, was always in support of that. But last year, they decided to flip the logic of this event, and rather than people of color deciding to stay away, they decided to tell white people that they were not welcome on campus on that day. Absence wasn't compulsory, but it was highly recommended. Now, Brett noticed immediately that this was not quite the same ethical and political message and said as much in an email to administrators and his colleagues. And then the witch hunt began. So there's much more about that online, and you can see Brett's other interviews on other podcasts, like the Joe Rogan podcast. But suffice it to say, this was an extremely bizarre and unproductive self immolation of a liberal student body. And Brett and his wife, also a professor there at Evergreen, have since been forced out. There was some settlement. We talk about it a little, but that's the necessary backstory to today's conversation. And now I bring you audio of the Seattle event with Brett Weinstein. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam Harris. Thank you. Well, thank you all for coming out. I can't see you all, but I can hear you, and it really is an honor, I must say. I will never take this for granted. The fact that I can put a date on the calendar and you all show up is just insane to me. So thank you for doing that. And another thing I won't take for granted is that people like this actually want to talk to me. My guest tonight is an evolutionary biologist. He is not that one, though. I've released some audio from those events with Richard Dawkins. You should know this is actually my first official live podcast. So you guys made it to the start of the tour. But my guest tonight is a biologist who focuses on big questions. He's done narrow research on things like the evolution of cancer and senescence and moral self sacrifice, but he also focuses on how an understanding of evolution can actually inform our lives and improve society. And we'll get into all of that. He's also become, in the aftermath of what is now known as the Evergreen Scandal, a truly wise and articulate defender of human rationality and free speech. So please welcome Fret Weinstein. Hey, Fred. Thanks for coming. Brett, I've been wanting to talk to you for some time, as some people here must know, I'm friends with your brother who did my podcast about a year ago. And your brother is this polymathic, very articulate, very interesting man. And then I saw a bit of you on YouTube, and you are also this polymathic, very articulate, interesting man. So your parents did something right. I want to know what happened there. But welcome. Thank you for doing that. Thanks for having me. So I think since we're in Seattle, the Evergreen Scandal is probably a noun phrase that people recognize. But I think we should talk about what happened there because it's a point of entry into many of the issues we're going to consider. I have actually seen it described by another name, the Weinstein Debacle. Yes. So let me give you the very brief version, and I should say it's a story that's very easy to get wrong, and the press, even when they are well intentioned, to often get the story wrong. I'm not going to bore you with the details of what actually happened, but I will say the general narrative is this. We hired a new president at the college. He set in motion a committee to study the question of equity on our campus and to propose some solutions to problems. And that committee advanced an elaborate proposal, sweeping changes to the college that was, in my opinion, a threat to the ability of the college to continue to function, certainly as an educational institution, and maybe at all. It was a threat to our fiscal solvency. And I objected to it, which was more or less part of my job as a faculty member. And I said, we really have to talk about this proposal. And there was Steadfast refusal to have that discussion. And as I continued to insist that we have that discussion, it raised the hackles of some other faculty members who became more and more aggressive in challenging me in faculty meetings, accusing me of being antiequity itself. And then the next part is hearsay. But I'm led to believe that one faculty member in particular set a bunch of students in motion, students that I had never met who arrived at my classroom and erupted into protest which disrupted the entire building. They demanded my resignation, and instead of backing down or running away, I tried to reason with them. And when those videos were placed online by the protesters, the reaction was not what the protesters had expected. The reaction was many people were, I guess, impressed that I had tried to talk to them rationally about the questions that were at the heart of the equity issue on our campus. And so it backfired. And that set in motion a debate about what the rights of people to protest are in the context of a college campus and what equity means and how we might pursue it. What was the reaction of your fellow faculty? How much support or lack of support did you get? That's a very interesting question. It looks very different on the inside of the college than the outside. On the inside, I got tremendous support from many people, but it was almost silent. And many of the people who were telling me that they were supportive were telling me that they wouldn't speak publicly about their position because they were afraid of what would happen. And in fact, they watched what happened to me. And I can't say that they were wrong. Yeah. Although the word cowardice does come to mind. It's a word that I refused to use at first because I don't think their fears were unjustified. And it's hard to judge other people in that way. But I will say, although their fears were not unjustified, if they came out one at a time or only one came out. But there really is safety in numbers here. It's the fact that you were out there all alone that led to this. This is exactly right, and maybe I do know. How do we solve this problem? I'm thinking it's something that I've often said of the Salman Rushdie affair. The reason why he had to go into hiding for ten years, obviously, is a different circumstance. But the whole problem was that there weren't 10,000 Salman Rushdie's the next day and there and there should have been. How do we get that collective response tuned up? The answer is not an easy one. But people need to level up with respect to game theory. And so the colleagues who were opposed to these false and dangerous equity proposals were responding to their narrow, short term interests. In other words, they were correctly perceiving that they would be stigmatized and demonized and maybe driven out if they stood up. What they were not realizing was that that will come for them in the end anyway. And so it really isn't a question of whether or not to expose yourself to that danger. It's whether or not to group together and face that danger and maybe survive it, or to expose yourself to being picked off one by one over time. And so there's a problem that I call the activist dilemma which is really a version of a tragedy of the Commons or a free writer problem in which everybody wants a problem solved. But the best deal is to stand on the sidelines and let somebody else take the risk or the cost of solving it and to get the benefit of that solution anyway. And in the end that's the undoing of the coalitions that you're imagining should form to prevent these things. Seems like we could solve this with an app. The right app would just get everyone to go at the same moment. So what were the ideas at the core of this problem? What gave us the Evergreen moral panic? Well, I think it has to do with a couple of different problems. I mean, I've come to view the folks who protested at Evergreen as an insurgency which to me means that you don't take them literally. That they are actually engaged in a tactical action and what they say they are up to is not necessarily what even they believe that they are up to. They are trying to accomplish something and they're actually quite powerful in doing what they're doing. So it's a little bit hard to know how you deal with a movement that says it is about certain objectives. For example, equity itself. Equity is something that most people I'm sure most people in this auditorium would imagine themselves to be in favor of. Equity. The problem is if you build a rule into your personality where you say anything that is positive from the perspective of equity is therefore something that I am in favor of then you can be easily manipulated because all that has to happen is somebody needs to wrap that label around something. Noxious and you may not detect until too late that it isn't what you signed up for. What's more, this sets the stage for your cognitive dissonance to be weaponized against you. Because once you've signed up, once you've protested in favor of something called equity and then it turns out that it isn't what it was advertised as you have a predicament which is do you admit that you were wrong to favor this thing in the first place or do you double down on protesting even further? And I've seen a lot of people who simply got involved in this movement because it was labeled in a way that sounded good to them, continue to move in the wrong direction, because at the point they begin to detect that it isn't what it's supposed to be, it's too late for them to figure out how to how to back out. And what's the connection to biology here? Is it an accident that you happen to be a biologist? Or is there something about biology that presents an especially good target for this kind of confusion? Yeah, that's a great question. It's no accident. I think I've been teaching and thinking very deeply about questions about how groups compete with each other and what role those game theoretic parameters and predicaments have played in human history. And so really, this particular instance was a variation on a theme, and it was quite plain to me what was going on. And the question is, could I make it plain to enough people who hadn't yet chosen sides to avert a disaster? And the answer with respect to evergreen is no. On the other hand, with respect to the outside world, it does appear that we have a much healthier conversation on that topic now than we did six months ago. There are topics here that I think we should touch because they're of such critical importance to our national conversation or a global conversation. And there are topics that it seems like we should be able to talk about rationally and in a truly open ended and open minded way without becoming hysterical. But these topics so reliably produce hysteria that it's just like everything's covered with plutonium. Let's talk about first the concept of race, which was at the center of this disruption on campus. As a biological concept. Is it a valid concept? Okay, we're about to get into serious danger. You're about to get on Twitter. Yes. Well, I have changed my tune on this question. I have not changed my understanding. But the term race is actually close to indefensible. And the reason that it's close to indefensible is not the one that we are told biology has unearthed. We are told that there is more variation within races than between races, and therefore races don't exist. That's nonsense. That actually mathematically, essentially has to be true. It says nothing one way or the other about the reality of races. What does invalidate the concept of race is the way that concept has been used. So, for example, one drop rules say something about what category you're in that is not in any way mathematical right? If one drop of black blood makes you black, then this is not a biological concept we're talking about. It's a social concept. So what I would say you're not in favor of the Nuremberg Laws, is that what I'm hearing? Well, I would say I use the term race because it's the term people expect when you're having these conversations. And then when the conversations get technical, it causes a problem. The real term that we should be using is population. Population is a biologically viable term, and we don't get into one drop rule kind of shenanigans surrounding it. So I would say if you're having a technical conversation, recognize that race isn't the right concept and move to population, and then we can talk about what the meaning of population is. I would say there's a higher level version of that term too, which is even more useful thinking evolutionarily, but has to be used with care. And that term is lineage. So a lineage is more useful because it is a fractal meaning that it exists independent of scale at least over a certain range. And so you and all of your descendants are a lineage. Your mother and all of her descendants, which includes the lineage we just talked about, is also a lineage. And we can step all the way back up the evolutionary tree of ancestry and we can generate larger and larger, more inclusive lineages. And so what we call races are typically populations. And those populations are one level in that hierarchy that is important in human history. That said, not every one of these is actually a lineage or a population. So what happened in Rwanda with Hutus and Tutsis was in large measure, artificial. Those were not actual lineages in any biologically meaningful sense. They were arbitrary based on phenotypic characteristics that may or may not have tracked lineage. So is a family a similar concept to race or lineage? Here, there is actually no clear boundary between a family and the rest of the species. Well, family is not technically a lineage. So you and your wife and all of your descendants are not a lineage because the common ancestor between you and your wife is not included. But that's not, I guess, biologically related. Yes. Essentially the theme of what you're saying is right that as we step up to larger and larger collections of related individuals what we have are larger and larger lineages which function like families. They evolve in the same way that families are capable of because they're related to each other in a genetically precise way. But the borders aren't necessarily easily defined. And there's no easily defined borders of a species either. There was no first human. Well, there is a most recent common ancestor of all humans. There logically has to be right. That does not mean that that was the first human in any sense that if you were standing there to observe this person that you could recognize them as such. But the important thing to realize is for some reason we have a bias. We tend to think that evolutionary dynamics ought to function in ways that make them easily tractable, that make them comprehensible to us. And there's no reason that that has to be true. And you picked the perfect example. We cannot define species in a way that recovers all of the things that we think we mean when we use that term. And it actually becomes particularly broken when we get near human beings. But the fact that we can't define species is of no consequence one way or the other to evolutionary dynamics. They are evolving and lineages are diverging into sub lineages that ultimately can't interbreed. And there's some point at which we say well, they're definitely two different species. But on the road to being definitely two different species you are kind of two different species and you're not really two different species. So we shouldn't expect evolution necessarily to make our life easy. What we should understand is that it is a process that does not think. And what it simply does is present us with representatives that did a better job of getting here than competitors that did a worse job. And to the extent that you are a member of many lineages at once, that's not a problem for this process. The process doesn't need to be able to say, you are one of these and you aren't one of those. It just needs to simply continually select that subset of lineages that are playing the game well. So now why is this so inflammatory? Is it that the one fact that that seems to keep coming up or or and or its its existence or possible existence is the thing that is avoided in all of this is that populations or races or any geographically isolated group of people at any point in history if you take two groups, they will vary with respect to certain traits. So we could even add culture here. They'll vary with respect to culture, but they'll also vary with respect to genes. And these genes govern many of the things we care about. Anything you can name about a human mind or a human temperament or a human physical characteristics, these vary, and they vary in very predictable ways. The fact that you can look at someone and make an educated guess about where their ancestors came from tells you that there's some pattern here that is conserved and it doesn't stop at the skin. And it would be a miracle correct me if I'm wrong, if everything we cared about that wasn't superficial like the skin, things like intelligence, things like empathy, things like aggression, all of these things that to some degree are governed by genes, it would be a miracle if the average values in every population were the same. What you've said, I think is right, but I think it actually leads to a fear that I personally, having thought about it a great deal, having traveled in all different parts of the world, lived in different populations, I don't fear it. And I think you don't fear that that's true or you don't think this thing this thing, if true, should be feared? I think the fear is born of the following observation. If we look at different sports, they select for different populations, right? It happens that marathon running is dominated by Ethiopians and Kenyans. You are unlikely to find Inuits being highly successful in marathon running. And there's a good reason for this, because people from Ethiopia and Kenya, the fact that that's even funny to picture is worth flagging. It is. Don't get on Twitter with that. Yeah, this just stays between us. So here's the thing. If you think about what it means to be an Inuit, one of the things it means is that you have been selected to conserve heat, because the difference between conserving a bit of heat and failing to conserve it is a life and death difference in many circumstances. If you live in the Arctic, if you're an Ethiopian, you have exactly the opposite problem. Radiating heat is the key to survival in a habitat that's that hot. So my point would simply be inuits are shaped so as to conserve heat. They are rounder and that round shape does not lend itself to marathon running. And it should not trouble us or surprise us that we see this bias. I think though, that people are very concerned that what we see playing out in different sports, the fact that different populations dominate different sports is going to be a mirror for what we find inside the mind. And I don't fear this. I think there's a very good reason to see these things as unfolding very differently in evolutionary terms, which is in the example I just gave you, you can see a very good reason that two habitats select in very different ways for one's phenotype. Every habitat selects for intelligence. Which doesn't mean that differences in intelligence didn't accumulate somewhere first. But the real question is, given that human populations are interconnected to the extent that there are heritable differences in intelligence, what we should expect them to do is spread because they provide advantage to anybody who gets a hold of them. And so I realize at the moment there seems to be except they might not provide fecundity and anyone who gets a hold of them. What if intelligent people are having fewer kids at this moment in history? We have to put modernity aside as soon as you got but it's been the process of still having so modernity could just be the last 1000 years, right? I would say modernity. Let me flip that around. There are genetic changes in us that have been selected for very recently, maybe not 1000 years, but like 5000 years. Things like lactose tolerance. Just to ask you how quickly can that happen? Leaving aside deliberate manipulations to the genome, how quickly would you expect a culture to determine genetically relevant change? Well, I'm going to have to get pretty politically incorrect so I'm leading you into dangerous territory. None of this is on this piece of paper. So those changes can happen much more quickly than we think. But human beings are very evolutionarily odd. So everybody is well aware that both nature and nurture play a role in what human beings are. And at some level the sophisticated consensus around that is that it's a fool's errand to try to separate out the influences of nature from nurture because of course they're both playing a role. What we don't say is that human beings are by far the most nurture based creature that has ever existed on planet Earth. That we have been pushed in the last phase of our evolution very far in the direction of nurture and very far away from the direction of nature. And that is not an accident that occurred because it provided a distinct evolutionary advantage. But in practice, what it means is that if you think of a human being as a physiological creature, that's the robot, and then it's got a brain, that's the computer, and then it's got a mind and that's the software. The answer is that human beings are effective at doing what we do because so much of what we are has been offloaded to the software layer. And that is really the key to why human beings are capable of dominating every terrestrial habitat on the planet, why we can go into space, why you all can exist in this room in a way that your ancestors, even 500 years ago, probably wouldn't have understood. So the fact that all of these things have been shifted over into a software layer that can be written and rewritten as circumstances change says that the analysis that we might do for some other creature is less likely to be applicable to us. The software layer is culture. The software layer is culture. But culture has to be defined a bit carefully. So culture are units of information that are transmitted generally from one member of a species to another. Now, this does provide culture with a special attribute, which is that it can move horizontally. You and I can exchange cultural tidbits, but most culture is likely to be transmitted vertically. So we learn an awful lot in our natal homes before we go out into the world and pick up more nuanced stuff. So, yes, that cultural layer, I would argue, is every bit as biological and every bit as evolutionary as the genetic layer. And in fact, it is a special trick that has been deployed by the genetic layer in order to solve problems that the genetic layer is not capable of solving on its own. Well, I want to get deeper into this and the link between biology and culture and whether understanding evolution helps us produce more normative culture and society is more worth living in. But before we go there, I want to just ask a question or two about evergreen. And this is a moment where we have an opportunity to say how we should rewrite our culture or modify it. So you take these topics that can be raised in the context of a biology classroom and on their face they seem dangerous to talk about. And there's obviously there are many memes that have been spread about how even having a conversation like this that skirts these issues is a symptom of intolerance or some kind of perverse fixation on human difference that has an ulterior motive that we should be suspect of. What should students do? Whether or not their understanding of the issues is correct, in many cases it won't be. But students who are outraged by something that's happening on a campus, in the class, or an invited speaker, what is the appropriate means of protest that doesn't lead to this absolute collapse of an institution. Yeah, what indeed? I would say the first problem is that something about modern protest is absolutely deaf to realities that ought to be important to it. And were this not the case, there would be lots of room to navigate based on concerns, some of which may be legitimate, many of which I can tell you are not legitimate. But the key to dealing with these tensions is to air them and to discuss them. And the hallmark of what I saw at Evergreen and what we have seen elsewhere is that the movement is utterly inevitable on the topics that it's focused on, which is just the, the oddest thing, and it's very unnatural. So I should say I lost very few friends in this circumstance. I did lose a few on the faculty side, but students have overwhelmingly been loyal to my wife and me and very sympathetic and generous and understanding. So the students who actually knew you, knew you, and the students who didn't know you demonized you. Right. But here's the part that I can't get past. When I talk to these students and I talk to other friends who watch this whole thing unfold, I hear the same thing over and over again, which is they're not confused about me or Heather or any of what happened, but they cannot reason with their friends who don't know us. Heather is your wife, who is also a professor, is also Professor Deborgreen for 15 years, in fact, Evergreen's most highly rated professor based on rate my professor online. You can go see her reviews. She's marvelous. But I know that if I was watching somebody, let's say that I thought ill of somebody, I thought they were a horrible person, and then somebody said to me, you know what, I actually know them, you've got them wrong, I would immediately become agnostic about what was going on. In an instant I would say, well, either the person I'm talking to doesn't understand what's going on or I've missed something, but something doesn't add up here, so I'm going to have to go slow and figure out what I've missed. This is not functioning in this circumstance. People who believe that they know what took place are so convinced of it that they cannot be derailed even by somebody saying, hey, you know what, I know that person personally and they're not a racist. That doesn't apparently count for anything. So that tells me that this is a kind of religious fervor. It's not a natural, it's not an analytical conclusion that might be amenable to being changed if evidence arose that said something different. It's very yes, it is. It does have a kind of cultic shape to it. And you would almost have to deprogram someone who's got a ton of invested in viewing you a certain way. When this first thing unfolded. I don't know if you remember it, but you tweeted something about. It being cult like and I had not thought that thought before I saw your tweet, but it instantly resonated and everything I've seen since says that. That's the correct analogy. Yeah. And also social media is obviously not helping in this regard. It's spreading these memes. And again, once you have enough sunk cost seeing it one way and you've been public about it, then the the cost, the social costs of changing your mind publicly and apologizing seems insurmountable to people, which again, this is an intuition that I don't share. It's like if I've, if I've been wrong publicly about something, particularly in this kind of area where I thought someone was Satan and they turned out not to be, I would be so uncomfortable having just maintaining that by neglect. I just feel like I'm wired to immediately rectify that problem. But it seems people have different intuitions here. Yeah, I don't quite get it. Because intellectual honest brokers, I think, all reached the conclusion that you just suggested, which is at the point you discover that you've got something really wrong. It's very painful to get on the right side of it, but it's way cheaper than not getting on the right side of it and continuing to pay the cost of being dead wrong. So there's a way in which no matter how bad it is to backtrack and get on the right side of something, it's always a bargain relative to waiting. And somehow that logic does not seem to register with people. I guess there's another topic, two other topics we should mention here that freak people out. Well, there's a name for what I now consider the most vulnerable attitude that would bias someone toward freaking out on these issues. And it is this term that I don't think I've ever uttered on a podcast. And I'm going to have you define for me. I haven't thought a lot about it, but this notion of intersectionality. What is intersectionality and when will this go away? Yeah, well, actually, Eric and I have a long running private discussion on this topic and the upshot is that intersectionality, like so many of these concepts that we are now being backed against the wall with, actually has a bit of truth at the bottom of it. It's a real thing, but it's been weaponized in a way that just makes it very dangerous. So the basic notion is that people who are from historically oppressed populations, they're not identifiable with one of these things that if you're trans and you're black that that's two different kinds of difficult road that you're on simultaneously and that the interaction of them is unique and emergent. I'm not sure I've actually heard it said that way before, but there's some unique fact of all of the various things that you face that are obstacles. And the problem is that this gets turned into a very simplistic formula that essentially is like, well, maybe I should put it this way. There are two factions in the equity movement. Equity being something that is never defined for a particular reason. But the two factions are a faction that earnestly wishes to put an end to systematic oppression and the other faction wishes to turn the tables of systematic oppression. And in the context of turning the tables of systematic oppression, one's intersectionality quotient, that is to say, the number of kinds of oppression that an individual can claim, basically says, where in the new hierarchy you're going to be? Now, this is folly. It's not going to work. And even if it did work, the intersectional movement is unstable game, theoretically, because it is composed of all of these different entities that are not ultimately the same. And you can see the friendly fire happening in that world where it's almost like a very unhappy game of Dungeons and Dragons where you have various powers that get misapplied against your friends. It's actually tragic. At Evergreen. There were two. So Evergreen has a very large Indigenous population and the movement used a lot of Indigenous imagery to begin with, most famously at something called the canoe meeting, which was an absurd exercise. But the canoe was there not by accident. It was there as a metaphor for this Indian mode of transport. And you could see that there was tension between these two factions, the Indigenous faction and the black faction. And to my way of thinking, these two populations have the greatest claim on systemic oppression, having resulted in a permanent underclass status of any two populations. But they were also in tension with each other. And that, ultimately, I believe, is going to tear the movement apart if nothing else does first, which is very sad because the systemic oppression is real. It wasn't real at Evergreen. It was phony at Evergreen. Evergreen was challenged because it was a soft target, not because it was a bastion of racism. But there are legitimate concerns to be addressed. And unfortunately, by pursuing them in this false way, we leave the impression that maybe the problem isn't real at all. I'm hesitant to go here to land on another dangerous noun, but I'm encouraged by how little trouble we've gotten ourselves in thus far. Cool. How do biologists think about sex and gender? And how will this survive? Export to the culture at large? Yeah, take it away from lifetime. But actually, this is funny because to me, sex and gender is a walk in the park compared to race. Okay. Sex and gender, there's the embarrassing aspect of discussing it, but the logic of it is much more straightforward and I think actually probably easier for us to deal with. Sexes are real and they're different from each other for evolutionary reasons. And some of those differences we can do nothing about. And some of those differences, though, they evolved and they came to the present as a result of the fact that they made evolutionary sense. We are not stuck with them. And we can reorganize the truth of the way the sexes interact, but we should do so deliberately and intentionally and not haphazardly. Because we stand to lose a tremendous amount if we just simply say men and women are basically the same. And anytime men and women don't behave the same way, that's because the patriarchy is oppressing people. That's just nonsense. And so the message I would have is we should retool sex and gender for modern realities. Just the simple fact of birth control changes everything and if nothing else did, that would license us to reinvent these concepts. But we should do so in an evolutionarily aware way. Can you say more about that? So the fact that women have control over their reproduction changes the Darwinian logic of sex difference or where are you going with it, changes everything. And it also results in human beings, modern human beings being in possession of this marvelous gift that they are now abusing. The fact that human beings can have sex and not produce babies, not play the baby lottery, that's a gift and it should be treated with respect. It should not be treated as well. We're therefore entitled to treat sex as if it were nothing. It's actually a very important it plays an important role in bonding between people and to the extent that we are going to reinvent it in some modern way, we should be careful with it. But yes, men and women are different and that those differences, some of them are absolutely profound. So the one I find the most interesting is this women do not have a reproductive strategy that allows them to produce huge numbers of offspring in a lifetime. There is the the world record is something like 60, which I still don't know how you get to 60. What did you say, 60 or 16? No, 60. So every time I say that I think way I've got to have that wrong and I look it up but it turns out to be right. Somebody get on snopes yeah, well, I think the answer is something like what it would have to be where the woman was predisposed in some way to give birth to twins and she was constantly handing them off to wet nurses so that she was immediately becoming fertile again. But anyway, it's an interesting story, but it's very much an outlier. Whereas there certainly are males that produce huge numbers of offspring in a lifetime and the way males produce huge numbers of offspring in a lifetime is by producing offspring in which they invest nothing, which is impossible for a female. Even a female who hands off offspring immediately to a wet nurse is investing all of the effort of pregnancy which is very substantial in humans. So what this means is that a it produces evolutionarily, the phenomenon of menopause eventually where women adaptively shut down their reproductive capacity and invest in the offspring they've got rather than producing new ones. But what this means is that effectively women, especially postmenopausal women, but women are much more likely to view their own well being and the well being of their brood in a way that is compatible with the well being of their lineage at a larger scale. Because women cannot produce huge numbers of offspring at the cost of other individuals, they are likely to be very far sighted in their wisdom about lineage level phenomena. After they can no longer produce offspring of their own, their interests become almost synonymous with the larger lineage. This isn't the way males see the world because even an old male potentially could produce more offspring and his fitness could go up in that way. Males, on the other hand, precisely because of the way they reproduce, are much more likely to gamble in a particular way and to gamble productively. So a lot of the big wins in human evolutionary history have to do with men taking insane risks and managing those risks to a win. So there's a kind of male wisdom that has to do with risk taking and a kind of female wisdom that has to do with long term thinking. And they're both wisdom. And frankly, what should we do with these things? We should democratize them both, right? We should hand them off. Everybody should begin to see their own well being tied up in the larger lineage level questions. We would behave much more reasonably on environmental issues if we did that. And we should also figure out what the message of male wisdom is with respect to risk. And there's no reason going forward that it has to be deployed by males more than females. Anybody who wants it should have it available to them but we shouldn't expect it to magically appear equally in both sexes. We should probably have to be deliberate about figuring out how to pass it on. But now what do you do with more inflammatory issues like possible sex differences in both propensities and interests? I'm thinking of like the Google memo, the James Demore letter. Feel free to weigh in on that anyway you want to destroy your reputation? I understand that we can step out of the stream of mere evolutionary logic and rewrite the software of culture. But if it is just a fact that men and women are different not only physically but psychologically in ways that are relevant toward the kinds of careers they seek out, what do we do when the different representation of men and women is always scored as a sign of bias or some sort of systematic injustice? Unless they're exactly the same, there will be a different representation. So what's descriptively true of our current situation? And what do you think we should be normatively sought? I think the answer here is pretty clear. It is simply not true that anytime you have different numbers of males and females in a profession for example, that it is in and of itself evidence that there must be some unequal access. We know that's not true. Right. To take an analogy, it happens to be the case that cycling I'm a cyclist and I follow cycling. Cycling is a sport. I'm not talking about competitive cycling, but casual cycling is something that is much less frequently done by black folks than white folks. Now, I can tell you that the culture at the bike store is not uninterested in selling you a bicycle if you're black. In fact, maybe it even carries some special cachet. But there is something in just the experiences of different populations that has resulted in, at the present moment, a non representative distribution of people in the hobby of cycling. Couldn't that just be an economic variable? Could be a lot of things. Zip codes are more dangerous to cycle in, and so if you grew up in one, you weren't encouraged to ride a bike, or it could be a lot of mundane things. What we know it isn't is any obstacle to cycling, to any population. Anybody who wants to can get a bike and cycle. Nobody's going to tell you to get off the road. So we know that it is something else. It is not oppression, it is some other thing, which may be the result of the fact that zip codes are differentially desirable from the point of cycling, and that zip codes are not distributed in a fair way. That's possible, but it is not oppression at the bike store. And protesting at the bike store would be pointless. Right? It makes no sense. That's actually fun to picture. I would support a bike store protest just for the irony of it. But in any case, I think the answer is fields occupations should be open, assuming that the particular field doesn't depend on physical braun or something else that would explain why certain people need to be hired more than other people. Anything engineering, it doesn't matter. It should be equally open to everybody. And frankly, I like seeing women do stuff that is traditionally masculine. I happen to be married to a woman who, though she looks lovely, sort of sees the world in masculine terms. And she's an evolutionary biologist who goes off to the Amazon and is comfortable carrying a machete. And that's the way she is. And I think it's great. So I think we should encourage people to follow their passions and to the extent that their passion is not consistent with historical biases in the way jobs or fields were populated, all the better. But we don't get to just jump to the logic that says if the numbers in the seats aren't even, then something has gone awry here. Because it's logically not true. Which is not to say that that's never true, it's just not necessarily true. Exactly. In fact, I think we know, if you listen into what women in tech are saying, even people who are supportive of Des Moore and his memo acknowledge that there's an awful lot of not so nice boys club kind of stuff that goes on in tech circles. So that's not good. And it probably does have an effect. How much of an effect? That's a question that we should study. To the extent it's driving people out of tech, that's bad and it should be addressed. But that's a far cry from the facile notion that 50 50 is what we have to have in order to demonstrate that there's no oppression. So how do you think about gender and its relationship to biological sex? That's a good question. I've never done this before. I just I can't get over the fact that I'm just leading you down a burning hallway filled broken glass. They have rushed the state. You're doing great. Sounds good. Yeah. Let's put it this way. Gender and sex are not identical. I think it would be fair to say that gender is the software of sex, which is not the same thing as saying so. My wife is fond of the description that these things are not binary, but they're bimodal. Right. So sexes tend to be two modes, and those two modes tend to line up with two genders. And then there's a lot of stuff that doesn't exactly fit. Some of that stuff may be the result of chromosomally intersex, people being different, and some of it may just simply be at the software level. It would not be surprising at all in light of the fact that we are software based creatures more than any other creature that it has ever been. We are living in circumstances that don't look like our ancestral circumstances. We are therefore getting all kinds of information in our developmental environments that is abnormal and untested and what effect it has on your understanding of your own gender. We can't say it's too early in the study. What I would say is that morally, we are absolutely compelled to be compassionate about the fact that lots of people are telling us, you know what? I have the sense that I was born in the wrong body. We don't know why that is. It's probably a mixture of phenomena. But come on, these are human beings, and they're telling you something about an excruciating condition and they're doing the best they can to figure out how to navigate it. So at one level, I think it's a very interesting biological question. As a human being, though, I think it's a very simple question. We have to be compassionate. I don't want to sign up for any fiction. Yeah. And there are so many cases where the unclear biological or scientific picture is married to a very clear political answer like that. The politics are so simple, right? And the politics are what would compassion dictate in this circumstance? And once you connect with another person's lived experience, the idea that the politics are difficult to resolve, just goes completely out the window. It's quite analogous to the question of just straightforward male female differences and how we should address them. The biological facts are interesting and they need to be navigated carefully. We can't sign up for fiction to solve the political problem, but at some level the political dimension is up for us to navigate without all of the information being available to us as to what causes the thing. They really are different questions and unfortunately, because people have been effectively led to believe that they have a choice, that if they want to sign up for the right political answer, that they have to sign up for a fictional biological answer. We're caught in this conundrum where people like me are in danger because we want to say hey, actually the biology doesn't support the idea that gender is made up and assigned by somebody when you're born. Gender is in general a good match for sex and it is not something that is simply arbitrary. It's real, it's biological, it has a meaning, but we can do the right thing and that's what we should do. I will also say though there is a just as it was with Evergreen and the issue of the equity protests, the story from the point of view of the outside world is not the real story. Inside the world of trans people there is a diversity of opinion which is now beginning to emerge and it is penalized in order to keep people on narrative and that's something we have to address. So, for example, ContraPoints got in big trouble in the last couple of weeks based on her willingness to talk to people who were outside of a particular social bubble and she was basically penalized online by the very people that had been supporting her. And this was a very unfortunate thing because what she was really trying to do was bridge a gap that we should all want bridged. So anyway, if we support those people, this will work out much better and we will get to the conversation that doesn't insult our intelligence about sex and gender. Yeah, one thing that I've been spending most of my time doing is trying to think about questions of meaning and value in a rational scientific picture. And it's the marriage of science and moral philosophy, loosely speaking, and important questions that society is grappling with or will have to grapple with. And not everything is at the center of that Venn diagram, but many things that I focus on and there are many people who are struggling to speak about. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with Sadartha Mukherjee. Sid, thanks for joining me again on the podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. So you've been here twice before. We spoke about both of your fantastic tomes, the Emperor of All Maladies, which is really the definitive book on cancer in our lifetime, just an amazing book, and also The Gene, which was also amazing. And so we've spoken about both of those books at length on the podcast. I recommend anyone interested in those broader topics, consult those previous conversations. But today I just want to I want to talk to you about the COVID pandemic in general and and just get your kind of expert eye view of what has been happening here these long now five months in the US. That we've been dealing with this. I think, ineptly by any objective criterion, our ineptitude is fairly well established here. I'll just remind people who may not know it, you are a famous oncologist and also writer, but your background is in virology, so you actually have a wheelhouse that is relevant to our current concerns. So just to start off here and we can go anywhere you want to go. Sid but what has been your experience watching this all play out, and watching in particular, watching the spread of misinformation and just the way in which it's been given top spin by political cynicism in many cases. And also just in the beginning, there was a fair amount of actually good faith uncertainty about the biology and epidemiology of COVID And so it really has been hard to draw the line at various points between a valid contrarian opinion and a dangerously irresponsible one. And, you know, granted that that line is probably getting clearer, but what's it been like for you these last five months watching this unfold? So I think there are several threads in that conversation that I want to break apart because they're quite different. So I want to make a very clear distinction between the uncertainties of which there are many and the ineptitudes of which there are many. So we can talk about them directly because those are important and there is gray zones in all those cases. So let's first talk about what went wrong and what could have not gone wrong in the United States. And around the world. Well, before that, let's talk a little bit about why this particular virus, of all viruses has the capacity to cause a pandemic. And the answer lies in the biology of the virus. There are two features, or three features of the virus that make it particularly a pandemic causing virus. That obviously is not true for many viruses. One is that it's completely new. We have never encountered it before as far as we know. And so therefore humans are immunologically naive to the virus. That's one. The second thing, and now we're getting to really important things, is the fact that the virus has a high degree of high capacity to spread. Virologists use one measure of this measure called r not, which is a measure of how many people one person infects. And obviously, mathematically speaking, if that number is above one, then the infection will spread exponentially. So some viruses have huge numbers. Measles is a very, very highly infectious virus. Sarscope too sits actually in the higher range. It's hard to estimate exactly what that number is because it varies depending on the population and the behavior of the population, but it's got a high number. And the third feature, which is actually probably the one that we realize very late and perhaps too late in the game and is the most insidious feature, is that asymptomatic people, people with absolutely no symptoms, seem to seem to be able to carry the virus and spread the virus. Now, that's a big distinction. That is not true, for instance, for Ebola or other very lethal viruses, when you have symptoms, you usually then become a transmitter. But it's true for this virus, we might be familiar with other viruses that it's true for HIV also it's true for HIV. You can have be completely asymptomatic but still transmit the virus. You can have virus in your blood and transmit the virus. These viruses that have this capacity to have asymptomatic transmission are particularly difficult because you cannot simply find people by symptoms alone. You have to find them by testing. And if you want to contain the virus using public health strategies such as containment or quarantine or isolation, you have to essentially find them. You have to go and find them. They will not find you because they don't know whether they whether they by you I mean a medical doctor or a medical system. And that's because they don't know if they're carriers, asymptomatic carriers, or they're really have the virus. So that covers the territory of why this virus, of all viruses, has and had the capacity to start a global pandemic. So this brings us to the next piece of conversation, which is the conversation about ineptitudes. So very important to remember that the ineptitudes started right from day zero in Wuhan, China. We should have known about this virus long before we actually did as a global community, several attempts to buy Chinese doctors in full good faith to communicate. The urgency of what was going on in China were essentially blocked, we think, or we now know to some extent. And in fact, as you very well know, the the ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm on the virus was essentially censored. And unfortunately, as you also know, he died of that viral infection. We'll come back to that in a second. It's very important because that tells us something about the virus, I think. So that's where the ineptitude started. I would say that's a global ineptitude that is also I mean, people have conspiracy theories around it. I don't know what to believe and what not to believe because the investigation has not really proceeded. The Chinese government has been extremely reluctant to share many crucial pieces of information around those first few days. Are you referring to the speculation that this came from a lab as opposed to a wet market or what conspiracy are you thinking about? So many. So one is that I think we still don't know the origin of the virus. I think that there is an interview in Science magazine from one of the workers who cultivates coronavirus in the Wuhan Coronavirus facility and she's adamant that it did not come from the lab. But the question is that incident has not been fully investigated. I just don't know. I don't think it was a bioterror weapon, for instance, nor do I think that it was an intentional infection of someone. Right. But I do think that we need to investigate and find out where the virus came from and perhaps even track back the very first index case, which is usually possible if we have access to full free information, which we do not at this point of time, just to linger there for a second. Does it actually matter? Within a very short period, we had the full sequence of the virus and we're now dealing with the basics of vaccine design and treatment design and epidemiology. Does it really matter what the origin moment was? It matters for future pandemics and it matters for future surveillance. One of the things that we have to learn from this and never let it happen again, and doubtless there are hundreds of thousands of viruses xenoviruses that lurk in bats and other animals, particularly social animals. I mean, one question is why bats seem to carry so many viruses. It's because they're very social and they live in very dense populations in environments. So it matters for the next pandemic because we cannot let this happen again. But moving to the United States, the ineptitudes, or I would say the glaring errors began also very quickly and began from the start. So one error that began from the start was that obviously the first response here was, oh, it's going to go away, it's not going to come, it's going to go away. That's obviously now not been the case. But that was a completely misplaced response. It was not going to go away. The first index case was seen at the end of January in Seattle. And that should have been an immediate call for urgent action because we knew, as I said, that this was a Xenovirus, it had a rapid spread. And we knew by that time there was enough suspicion in the virological community that there were asymptomatic spreaders. It wasn't definitive, but as soon as that suspicion is raised, you need to start acting on it. So we're at the end of January, we're in a small hospital outside Seattle. The first index case walks in. That should have sounded a major alarm to the CDC and a major alarm to every health authority saying, the virus has now entered the United States and we should do something about it. The second major, I would say glaring error, which should never be repeated, was probably the biggest of them all. And that is, once the virus was in the United States, there was no test for the virus for about 40 days. So there was no FDA approved test for the virus for 40 full days. I cannot emphasize as an immunologist or a virologist that it is inconceivable that that would happen, but for 40 full days, there was no test for it. And that was partly because the the CDC tried to make a test. And the test, the first batch of the test worked. I interviewed virtually everyone I could, and there's a big piece that I wrote in The New Yorker about this. The CDC made a test. Actually, in the end, it was a good test. But when they expanded the batches of the test and sent it out to the Public Health Services, which is where these tests are usually then monitored, the test failed to work. One probe, one of the pieces of the test kept showing up with false positives, which meant the entire test was not reliable. Now, in that meantime, in that same period of time so as the clock is ticking now, day one, day two, day three several academic investigators, including folks like Alex Grenninger at the University of Washington, who I interviewed for the piece in The New Yorker and I have had a long communication with Alex Greninger. Had by himself in his lab, developed a test for the virus. But that test had to be in order to be used. It had to be licensed by the FDA and the CDC. Now, the FDA and the CDC, we have something which allows such licensing to proceed very quickly, which is called the Emergency Use Authorization EUA. And if you speak to the FDA and the CDC, they will tell you that, oh God, gosh, our EUA was working fine. We were just waiting for our tests to be corrected. If you ask people in the private laboratories, they will say just the opposite. They will say, well, we applied for the EUA, but it took. By the time it turned around, it was already too late. And I think you describe and I think this was in your New Yorker piece, you describe doctors spending nearly 100 hours filling out forms to get permission to test. And these forms couldn't even be emailed right. They had to be snail mailed to the FDA. And it just sounds like the infrastructure over there is a generation old. So I spoke with the FDA. And I spoke with the CDC. The FDA says that it was a parallel infrastructure that you had to do a snail mail, but they would also accept emails. That's what the FDA says. And it also says that, and it maintains that they were processing these as fast as they could. The laboratory investigators say that that's not the case, that in fact, the snail mail slowed them down. One problem, of course, you have to realize that there was an intrinsic problem at this point of time, which is that no one had samples. So in order to validate a test, you need samples to validate a test. But if you have only it's a perfectly circular argument. So, in other words, if you don't have a test that works, you don't know who to validate it on, because you don't know who's infected. And how can you prove that a test works if you don't have samples to validate it on? Do you see what I mean? Yeah. We really need to learn about these pieces of logic or these sort of failures, some of which are, I would say some of which are intentional, some of which are non intentional. But this is a perfect example, and it could be applied to any business. It could be applied to any medicine. If asymptomatic individuals can carry the virus, which happens to be in this case, then how do you get 20 people? How do you test whether the test works or not? You can't, because you don't have samples to test on anyway. In any case, by 1520 days in, Greeninger and others had scrambled together enough material from various sources to be able to test to show that their test worked. And eventually, of course, the FDA CDC test also began to work there. There was a faulty reagent that was corrected. But by all of this time, 40 odd days had passed. 30 odd days had passed for the most part. I mean, of course, there was testing going on as well, and that's a critical period of time, because that is when the infection was spreading. And we don't even know what happened in those 30 to 40 days. We don't know how many people flew from Seattle to, for instance, New York and New Jersey. We don't know how many people came in from there was no travel ban, remember, on Europe. So that is mistake number two. So we just went through mistake number one, which was the absence of testing. Mistake number two was to dismiss the idea or was to say, this is a Chinese problem, this is a problem that is in China, and not recognize the fact that the slopes of infection rates were climbing rapidly in Europe, in Italy and Spain. So during the time that we had no test, there were people coming in and going out of major cities, new York being probably the major epicenter. And there are several genetic clues that clearly suggest that the infection in New York at least, was primarily seeded by European travel and not by not travel from Asia. Right. The infection in Europe was ceded in turn from Asian travelers who came into Italy and Spain. But the infection in New York, we have genetic evidence to suggest that it was from people who came in from Europe. So not putting in a travel ban, testing ban, or even a quarantine in isolation during that period of time when we didn't have tests is a crucial error. And that was error too. I should say that just backtracking a little bit. I should add that the FDA and the CDC have had a long history of working with public health laboratories, but they have had actually not a very long history of working with private academic laboratories. So like the University of Washington or like Columbia University, et cetera. So that is in some ways error number three. Because if the FDA had had a well established track, if they had vetted and pre authorized, as countries like south Korea and other places did some academic laboratories as being good enough or of high enough caliber, that if they were to apply for a test, a successful test, that the FDA would say, okay, ours doesn't seem to be working. We'll take yours until ours gets to work. That infrastructure was present within the FDA, but present in a very infant form. That's what the academic laboratory folks told me. So academic pathologists told me. The FDA says that that's not true. And so the question is, when we perform the autopsy, one of these two things is correct. We don't know which one it is. Either the FDA has had a long tradition, and it's quite smooth and streamlined, their capacity to work with academic laboratories, pathology laboratories like Greeningers and Columbia's and New York hospitals, or it is, in fact, was not streamlined and had to be streamlined in a kind of emergency setting. So now we keep moving. The clock keeps ticking forward. So now we have people from Europe traveling into the United States carrying virus symptomatic, asymptomatic we don't know. There is nothing going on in the borders, except for originally, as you very well know, a ban against Chinese travel. But of course, that was not where the leak came from. And they're coming into New York, and they are spreading the virus asymptomatically and we don't even know where they're going, what they're doing, where they're spreading the virus. And we don't even know how many because the test is still lacking. So move the clock forward a little bit. Forward again. Actually, before we advance, I'm wondering let's just linger on the testing piece for a second. So what ensures that we learn the right lessons here? It seems to me that some lessons seem genuinely hard to learn because in normal times, you would view this sluggishness from the FDA and the CDC as a feature, not a bug, in that, I mean, we obviously it's got to be motivated to some degree by wanting to ensure quality control. You don't want to just approve labs all over the place to get their competing tests to scale. And I got to think the status quo was motivated to some degree by an awareness that there's a trade off between safety and speed in situations like so you're absolutely correct. I mean, you know, we the last thing we want is a trigger happy FDA or a trigger happy CDC. So that we certainly don't want that. But what we do want is CDC and the FDA and an FDA that is able to respond to pandemic situations in a different way than it responds to the approval of any drug or test in normal circumstances. So there has to be some kind of hysteresis or some kind of space, as it were, dial up, dial down system in which you can dial up or dial down the responsiveness based on the situation. One way that I proposed in the New Yorker piece and subsequent pieces, I'm on several panels that have to do with COVID response and what we learned from the COVID response. But one way is to do exactly what I told you, which is to do some kind of pre authorization so that the FDA would have, rather than waiting to receive applications in the setting where their own test was, not working to go and seek out people that they have already vetted and ask them, can you help us figure out at least an interim test? We will validate that test and at least launch that while we wait for our test to come and working. So that would have been one kind of solution. And this pre authorization process or pre vetting process could be quite stringent. The FDA has lots of time in between pandemics to ensure that the University of Washington is not just out to make a fast buck and that they're PCR machines, and this is what their capabilities are. How many tests can they do per day? What is the reliability of their testing infrastructure? Can they report out those tests, et cetera, et cetera, so that rather than waiting and being passive, the FDA would have been or the CDC and the FDA would have been active during this process. So that's one thing that one can learn. You don't want to trigger happy FDA, but you do want an FDA that is prepared to what I would call dial up and dial down in the circumstances of a pandemic. Yeah. Okay, so take me to the border. We now have people pouring in from Europe. Many under the increased load precipitated by the sudden announcement that if you don't get in in the next 15 hours or whatever it was, you're not getting in. So we just had people flooding the airports of Europe, trying to catch the next plane out, obviously breathing heavily on one another all the while. How do you perceive that moment? We're then now in a situation where, as I said in New York City, we don't have testing, we don't know what's happening here, and what is happening in Europe is just the opposite. So what is happening in Europe is that everyone is reacting to the situation in Europe, and they are getting on planes and jumping on planes and essentially coming as soon as they can. They're arriving into New York City, and New York City very soon is full of people from Europe who are trying to catch the next flight back. And we have no quarantine for them, we have no isolation for them, we have no contact tracing for them, and there is no way to know how long they will stay, whether they are tourists, whether they are locals returning back. It's just mayhem. So that brings us the clock now ticks, and we are now back in. We are now sort of 60 days, 50 to 60 days, and we're beginning to see the uptick in New York infection rates by now. So clearly this is a signal that's a problem. There's a you know, there's a surge or the beginning of the surge. And that's usually when a usually when we start to do things like quarantining and now things, you know, isolation, contact tracing, and masking becomes important. So at this stage, what's important is to have one clear, consistent message saying, we're just beginning to test. We don't know if people have been quarantined or not. We don't know if people have been isolated or not. We're just beginning to test. But the first thing you should do is start social distancing, avoid crowded situations, et cetera. But most importantly, we don't know, and we'll come back to this point in a second. Sam we don't know if masks work or not, but they have historically worked against other respiratory viruses. So if you're symptomatic, wear a mask, and particularly if you're a frontline healthcare worker, wear a mask and wear probably wear full PPE, because that's what we learned from the Chinese, that it's a highly contagious virus. And essentially the CDC vac vacillates on masks. First it says, Nope, not required. And we've spent a lot of time said it was even worse than that. I don't know if this was the CDC or the World Health Organization or both, but someone at that point, I think, clearly concerned that there was going to be a run on PPE, and therefore not enough for frontline workers. There was messaging around masks not only maybe not working, but being counterproductive, that you'd be more likely to be touching your face, you're more likely to get sick, perhaps by wearing a mask. So people were actively discouraged at one point from wearing masks. That's exactly right. And the Surgeon General at that point in time also said that masks were not required. And the logic that I have heard is that it was because people were saying that there'd be a run on PPE, personal and protective equipment, then, that doctors would therefore not be able to get any. But that obviously the public to the public, that makes no sense. How can it work for doctors but not work for you? It just doesn't make any sense. And so we then go through this moment in which we don't know if masks work or not. And you can't test it experimentally, right? You can't give people coronavirus and say either half wear masks or half don't wear masks. And see and remember, masks work both ways based on a whole bunch of experience with respiratory viruses. They protect a spreader from spreading, and they protect an uninfected person from getting virus, from getting the virus. So we don't know. And we're in this kind of limbo around masking. And so what's happening in the hospitals, meanwhile, is just really terrifying in New York hospitals, because they also don't have enough protective gear, so they don't have enough N 95 masks, the kind of mask that really is fitted and, you know, lets through only a very small fraction of, of respiratory particles. These are not that heavy duties. They're not that fancy. They cost less than a dollar, typically. But hospitals are running out of masks, and the emergency rooms and the hospitals are becoming progressively crowded with people who have symptoms. So there is a complete breakdown of communication between all the folks concerned about what what is happening. The hospitals are getting crowded, the doctors are and nurses, and I should say especially the nurses, don't have equipment to protect themselves, so they're cobbling together whatever they can get. Some hospitals have N 95 masks, some don't. They're cobbling together whatever they can get, and they're trying to move forward. But really, it's an emergency situation. Many doctors are getting exposed. And as you know, some people are going to the ICU because they don't have some patients are going to the ICU because they're beginning to develop these severe complications of COVID So that is where sort of all of a sudden, we are in the middle of we're now in the mid pandemic, and many people start obviously having severe problems. The second thing that happens at this stage, which is another mistake, is that some people get discharged from the hospital after being tested, and they are asked to return to nursing homes, where also they don't have PPE, and nor do they actually have any real equipment to protect the workers or protect residents from each other. So we have a situation in which people are basically going back, and these nursing homes become petri dishes because the virus then goes and infects via nursing home workers, healthcare workers, or through direct contact, people who are elderly and who are the most vulnerable, and this cycle begins to repeat itself. So you go to the emergency room because you feel sick. You aren't sick enough that they would admit you to the emergency room. There is no quarantine in place. There's no isolation in place. There is no contact racing in place. Some of those people are sent back to their rehab facilities, nursing homes, et cetera, because they aren't sick enough to be in the hospital, because the hospital beds are too full. And they go and they become new sort of sources of infection at the nursing homes themselves. Meanwhile, the government is saying publicly, don't wear masks. We have a federal system, as you know, which is a problem and a pandemic. We'll come back to that in a second. It's the governor's individual decision about what to do, whether to isolate, whether to quarantine, whether to close schools. New York ultimately closes schools, in my opinion, late, too late, two weeks too late, perhaps. And then by then, it is too late, in this city at least, to do anything. So from that moment forward, I mean, I know New York became its own version of Italy, and so many things happened from the public perception side of this that are just, frankly bizarre. I mean, the fact that we were sitting here watching, I guess it's understandable to hear that there's a flu in Wuhan, and who knows if it's going to get here? But once it's starting to get here, and once we see what's happening in Italy, our lassitude seems fairly inexplicable from my point of view. But even if you could explain that somehow, psychologically, this intuition that never really had to be stated, there might be some law of nature that would prevent this thing from spreading to every corner of the earth and every inch of our society if we just sat there and did nothing about it. Once it hit New York, and New York became fairly similar to lumbery, you still saw a country that was incredibly slow to respond. I mean, with some exceptions, California responded pretty quickly. But even the places that have responded, even California, and went through a significant lockdown, it still was a fairly piecemeal effort, and all the while undermined by our basic failure to get any of these necessary ingredients of a response to scale. I mean, testing, tracing PPE took a long time. I don't even know if PPE is in danger of running out now. How do you explain this general picture of forget our initial missteps? Once we understand the gravity of the problem, how do you explain our failure to get up to speed and. To perform the way you'd expect the leading technical and medical power on Earth to perform. Well, there are several explanations, Sam, and you've identified most of the problems right off the bat. One explanation is that in this federal system, or really in a system where governors have independent choices and decisions to make and have full authority or large authority, unless you have a system in which under emergency, a task force takes over and tells people exactly what to do, then things begin to fall apart. So what happens in this particular situation is that states essentially have or use their own metrics, their own decisions, and they are quite wildly different. So California and New York. New York is in the mid pandemic. California reacts early, and many places impose lockdowns. But in general, these lockdowns are not really severe or compliant. So business is our lockdown, which of course causes great economic loss, but people are still wandering the streets. There is no systematic lockdown. And that's the opposite of what you want, right? So you want business to businesses, obviously, to remain open as long as you can, and you want people to stay in their homes and be tested and be contact traced. But in many places we've seen in the United States, just the opposite happens. Businesses have to comply for lots of reasons, including the fact that they have to protect their employees, but people are not compliant. You remember in Spain and Italy and many other countries, you know, there was really a quasi military intervention to prevent people from from entering the streets. You know, if you went to the streets, a police officer would come up to you or a military officer would come up to you and say, what are you doing and why are you out of your house? That was the state of lockdown, which is a real lockdown. A quasi lockdown is worse because it hurts the businesses and it doesn't prevent the spread in people. And unfortunately, in many cases, there was a quasi lockdown. Masking was not mandatory in New York, we quickly made masking mandatory. And I suppose I'm proud to say that's one of the things that I and others pushed very early on saying that yes, we'll never have the final evidence and maybe we won't get it in time, but from lots and lots of respiratory viruses. We know that social distancing and mask wearing does reduce viral load, does reduce viral transmission, especially if both the infected and the infecty or the naive. If both of them wear it, you get a double effect and potentially a synergistic effect. So what you have in the United States is this kind of bizarre crisis in which there is what I would call a quasilockdown with enough leak through that in fact, as soon as the lockdown is opened in some places, the virus starts spreading again. Now, in New York, the lockdown was very strongly enforced. And to some extent, we saw the worst of things. We saw the worst of the pandemic, a huge number of cases and a huge number of deaths. But then once the lockdown was in place, there, it was quite a lot of compliance. There's a high degree of compliance in new york and new york state on masking. There's a high degree of compliance on social distancing. And new york opened in is still going through phases, but new york opened in phases. And that's important, because when you didn't open in phases, what we've seen in other places, when you went from lockdown to complete open situation, what happened is we've seen that once again, the curve of not just infected cases, but deaths has begun to rise again. It's very important here. These are lessons that we've learned actually from cancer and from other diseases. It's very important to count deaths, because deaths are not sensitive to testing. If you increase testing, you'll detect more people. Deaths are not sensitive to testing. Deaths are an absolute value. And I would urge anyone who's listening or reading to this it's very easy to google. You can just google us covered debts, and you'll see exactly the whole story laid out in front of you. You'll see the rise, which is mostly in new york, new jersey, et cetera, rise the lockdown, and then you'll see a second rise. And that is of course, in states such as arizona, southern california, especially more than northern california, and other states, texas, except sid, even here, there's been room for doubt and conspiracy theories, right? So they're even fairly prominent people have come forward saying that the death statistics are completely false because hospitals have been incentivized to more or less presume or assert COVID as the cause of death, even when someone is stage four pancreatic cancer and had a week to live anyway. Or they didn't even test them, they had a fever. And that's compatible with a COVID diagnosis. And you had you've had people again, you know, you've had obvious crackpots and lunatics saying this, but then you've had extremely prominent people who don't have any expertise here, you know, people like elon musk, you know, out on social media saying these things. So what can you put this particular concern to rest that our fatality statistics can't be remotely trusted? Yeah. Yes, I can. Or partly can. I can do it from two angles. One is from our own hospital, from the new york experience. I know from people from my patients, at least no one that I know was incorrectly marked as dead from COVID when they actually were dying, or dead from something else. So that's anecdotal, but more than anecdotal, actually, we have numerical evidence of this being true, and that is the fact that the case fatality rate of for COVID, which is the number of people who die upon getting infected, has really hovered across the world around 0.7% zero, you know, a little bit higher, a little bit lower. And obviously it depends on age groups, you know, so if you're in the in the worst category of the the most susceptible category to death, it would rise to five, six, seven. These are elderly people or having comorbid conditions. But if you look overall, the the pattern of the numbers end up being in the 0.7 to 0.8% range. And when we were doing adequate testing, we have now slowed down in the United States, because now the test is you can't get a test. The test turnaround time has now gone up again to about seven to eight days. But when we were doing adequate testing and appropriate testing, the mortality rate was tracking that number 0.7.8 .1%. It wasn't tenfold higher, one fold lower. So if you just use simple math, it will tell you that the simple math would tell you that as long as the deaths don't go a log fold, let's say, or ten fold higher or lower than what has been seen all around the world, then the debts are real. Now, of course, these people have pre morbid conditions or comorbid conditions. And yes, of course, some of them may have indeed have had other reasons to be susceptible and to die, and maybe they had pre morbid conditions that were quite severe. But again, pure mathematical reasoning will tell you that it can't be even if there is a conspiracy, it can't be such a large conspiracy to completely distort the distort reality. Am I making sense? Yeah, no, that makes sense. So how do you explain the fact that even at this late stage, we seem to be losing ground on testing? Again, the picture is one of an erstwhile medical and technical superpower struggling to produce everything down to cotton swabs. Why are we not testing and tracing like a supercharged South Korea at this point? Well, that's partly because we don't have all the equipment to do that, and we didn't you know, we have, unfortunately. And again, I would refer back to the piece I wrote in the New Yorker. There's a very important interview there of one of the people who makes N 95 masks as an example, and basically his business this is a guy named Mike Bowen. His business of making N 95 masks couldn't survive because he was constantly getting outcompeted by by the Chinese. And because of cost cutting and because of of efficiency in hospitals, their business was unable to survive. And so we became progressively dependent on other countries, including China in particular, to produce valuable reagents which are important in the medical process. So we have a situation in which all of a sudden one reagent isn't for a test, isn't available, and the whole testing system breaks down. And that's what we've seen again. So one thing that has become very clear is that supercharged as you are, you may be supercharged on efficiency, but you are not in this case supercharged on resilience, and you need both. You need to be supercharged on efficiency, and that's great. But when things are in short supply, you need to have stockpiles which are not efficient. You need to have a backup system which is not efficient. You may need to have again, you may need to have manufacturers, local manufacturers, not beholden to Chinese goods or to goods from any other country. I don't want to blame one country or over another in this particular situation, but not beholden to any particular country in which you are essentially so beholden to some good from that country that if that part fails, you can no longer work. And that's been the case in our situation. How have you perceived the role of public health communication here? I mean, I'm thinking in particular about Robert Redfield, who's heading the CDC, and Deborah Birks, who was heading the task force, you know, Pence's task force on, on Corona, and I guess you know Anthony Fauci as well. These have been the most, to my eye, the most public medical voices, and to varying degrees, most of their public statements have seemed fairly constrained. And even, you know, abject attempts to simply avoid embarrassing President Trump. We're walking a line which really in many cases can't coherently be walked around his misstatements in their efforts to communicate public health information. And again, to varying degrees, I would say Fauci has escaped comparatively unscathed. But both Burke and Redfield, again, forgive me if these are friends of yours and, and I now seem to be disparaging them, but they I know Fauci. I know Fauci very well. I don't know Deborah or or Dr. Brooks, I should say, and not nor any of the other folks in that. This is now getting to be a very old story, where you have people who have real reputations and who have accomplished a lot in their lives, right? Whether it's in business or the military or in this case, medicine, who I can only assume have reputations for integrity and probity and just a host of virtues that are worth protecting. And they undergo this horrible transformation in proximity to Trump. It's almost a visible diminishing of their integrity just standing next to the man. I mean, it's like radiation poisoning. Every second they spend standing too close to the reactor core, you can see them withering. And so for Burke's and Redfield, this has been fairly painful to watch when they're at the podium trying to make sense and say something responsible in the wake of whatever insane bloviation just came out of the president. And Fauci has had to navigate that same space as well. And the result has been a pretty just frankly ineffectual communication about the public health imperatives at the moment. That's just been my experience watching CNN whenever I happen to catch these press conferences which happen less and less. What has been your perception of this? I think of the people there. I know Tony Fauci the best, and I've worked with Tony on various things before. I think that it's been quite clear that he's had really a task that completely unenviable task. He's had a task that I just don't know how you could possibly navigate, given the situation and given the problems that have arisen. So I think you're absolutely right. You can't keep saying and play. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay. This is an episode that we were very slow to release due to events outside of our control. We've created an app for the Absolutely Mental Podcast, which is currently available on iOS only, and it's now in the App Store, except that got delayed because, strangely, the powers that be at Apple thought that we were impersonating Sam Harris and Ricky Gervais and stealing the intellectual property of those esteemed gentlemen. So it took some time to actually get the app situated, and that's why it took so long to release this conversation, wherein I get Ricky's reaction to the infamous Oscar slap. Obviously, we're a little late to the party here, but I think the conversation has aged well, and it was great to get Ricky's take on all this. He was actually trending on Twitter immediately after the event itself. He seemed to be the third person on Earth people most wanted to hear from at that moment, and I don't believe he has said anything at length since. So, for better or worse, here's our conversation about Will Smith, Chris Rock, and all things related to the ethics and psychological weirdness of that moment. As always, it's great to talk to Ricky. If you want more of us, you can find us@absolutelymental.com where we have now three seasons of that podcast. Also, if you're on iOS, you can download the Absolutely Mental app where this conversation can be heard in its entirety for free. And also, if you're a subscriber to Making Sense, you will now hear the full conversation. Enjoy. Hey. How are you doing? Yeah, good. Well, I mean, if you really want to know, it'll take a while. Give me the first pass. I'll give you the minor one. The minor one on my side, which I think we've talked about, but this will show you what a a hard headed fool you're collaborating with. I think I've discovered for the hundredth time that red wine is not good for me. And this is the way I do science. I perform this experiment 99 times and doubt it again. I'm dealing with that. I don't know what it is, but I understand what alcohol does to me. I understand how to avoid a hangover. But red wine gives me a headache. Reliably. That's how I drink now. I drink as much as I can, but avoiding the hangover. I know my limit. I tried to start drinking less in the lockdown, so I thought I just have two glasses of wine a night. Right? But all that happened was the glasses got bigger. It was like some sort of game. Yeah. You get you have to talk to the bartender. Yeah. Your right hand who's the bartender needs to needs to be, you know, I never go out. I think I go out about once every two months now. I didn't go out at all in lockdown, obviously, so that was some yeah. Drinking it drinking at home, watching Netflix. But yeah, it's also I'm older now. It's like you can't do the things like even tennis now. I play tennis every week and I can't walk for 24 hours afterwards. Right. I wake up and it feels like I've been in a car crash. Like I I do I'm doing warm ups or gigs and you don't notice. It like if I do two in a row again, the second it's like, what have I done? The adrenaline and that you don't notice at the time. It's just like everything everything has a bigger effect now. I've got like I've got shin splints in with one shin that I've got. Just got to stop running. But I don't stop doing it. That's the thing. I think I don't stop doing what's bad for me, because why should I? Just because I can't walk the next day. That's no reason not to play tennis today before. Yeah. So just getting worse and worse, really, isn't it? Yeah. Well, you're five years ahead of me, I think. But the view from here is already bad. I can't wait. I can't wait to like this also. You get heavier as well. You just creep up. You just stop weighing myself because it's like just every bad news. Well, I don't know. His metabolism and refuse. You work out less because it aches. It's all muscle. You're putting on a pound of muscle every month. Yeah, right. I had that idea that was my latest way to beat the system. I read that muscle weighs more than fat, but you burn more calories at rest. So I thought I'll just work out. So I just got fat and muscley. At least you're strong. If you're going to be fat, you might as well be strong. That's another thing. You're not as strong. You wake more. Your tendons are not as good. Like, if I do squats now, I think I'm not going to be able to get up after this. It's like you you lose your nerve as well. Everything just I don't know why it happens. It just does, though. You just feel you just feel weaker. And it is I'd say it's. In the last two years, I thought of 58. I don't like to hear that. 58. Yeah, I know. Yeah. But 60 is like no, that's it. That's it. I do have the solution for you. The the near term solution. You can do your squats as long as you're just picking up cases of wine. Yeah, exactly. With that, I do count things as exercise. Now, if I have to run up and down the stairs I think that's you don't for the day. Yeah. But I think you've got a certain amount of heartbeats and breaths and steps in you, and so as you do more exercise, 3 billion wear out. I forget it. I think the number is 3 billion heartbeats. Something like that, yeah. Really? Well, that's good, because my resting heart rate is really low. It's about 58 to 60. The clock is ticking down much faster. Anyway. Yeah, I'm all right. Thanks for asking. Okay, so we have something to talk about, and I think we're both a little sheepish about talking about it. There's a bandwagon that we don't want to jump on. Yeah. But in reality, I think you of all people can be forgiven for talking about this at any point, and the comments will age well, because, honestly, you were the from the looks of my Twitter feed, you were virtually the third person on Earth people were thinking about when this episode happened. So I'm referring to the the famous Oscar slap yeah. Delivered by Will Smith to Chris Rock. Now we're talking, you know, five days, six days later. Yeah. So let's just take a look up. I woke up that Monday morning, 730, and I had the odd email and message and DM from friends and colleagues in America going, you know, things like, what the fuck? I feel so sorry for Chris. What would you have done? That's disgusting. I didn't know what they were, so I put it together, and I thought Chris Rock went, oh, Chris Rock. What's that, then? Will Smith Oscar is right. So I googled it, and immediately I watched the clip. Yeah. Can you recapture your immediate reaction? I was angry. I thought no one should hit someone for hearing someone they don't like. This wasn't a bar. This wasn't a hockey field. You know, it was two men in tuxedos. It was strange, and it was it was shocking, and obviously, initially, it looked it looked like the world agreed with me that this shouldn't have happened and he shouldn't have done it. And I stand by that, and that's my first and last assessment of it. He shouldn't have done it. But I also saw there were people saying, well, Chris Rock deserved it. I think, well, what what do you mean, he deserved it? And they had lots of reasons that he deserved it. The joke was offensive. He shouldn't say that about his wife. All the not valid reasons in my book, but I could see that it wasn't a slam dunk. There were some people that thought that Will Smith was in the right, and I never did, and I still don't, even though I think I feel a bit sorry for him to some extent because we don't know what he's going through, but we get to that. But, yeah, I was sort of outraged, but I didn't want to join in. I didn't want to add my voice. Everyone was there, but then I saw I was trending. It was suddenly all about me, and everyone was saying, what would Ricky Gervais have done? Or, oh, my God. That's nothing to what Ricky Gervais said. Oh, my God. That was the most common intake. Yeah, exactly. And I resisted it and we spoke, and I didn't really want to do anything, and I just thought, it's not my thing. And I actually had a new material night the next night, and when something happens that's so big, you have to address it straight away. So they stopped thinking about it. So they stopped thinking about it. So I went out there and I went, I haven't got any WillSmith material. And they laughed. That big laugh of recognition. He said something, right? I said it was ridiculous. I trended. I was the number one trend. Nothing to do with me. I wasn't even there. And I said people were saying, oh, what would have happened if Ricky Gervais had been doing it? I said, well, nothing would have happened because I wouldn't have made a joke about his wife's hair. I'd have made a joke about her boyfriend. And that was the big laugh, and that was the end of it. Right. And I got on with it as well. But there was someone in from the press on a new material night that they tweeted that. And then I trended again, right? I trended again with that. So that's why that's why I compete with it. But realize this. But I desperately tried to keep my mouth shut when it's not to do with me, but you get drawn in, and suddenly now I've got to mention it. But, yeah, I was worried that I was worried about principle. I thought it was bad on principle. I thought Chris Rock didn't deserve it, and no one does. And and certainly not with that joke, because I didn't find the joke. It was not how anyone could find that offensive one, people were saying it's about a medical condition. Well, her medical condition was nothing to do with the joke. The joke was her appearance. And I don't think Chris Rock even knew she suffers from alopecia or any medical condition. I think he saw well, let's just linger on. Let's take this piece by piece, because there's so many layers to this. So just that point about the nature of the joke yes. Whether he knew or not. Whether he knew or not, the source of her baldness, that's probably relevant to his intentions. But even if he knew, it's not a hard hitting joke because of the basic reality of her appearance, which is one, she's a beautiful woman who happens to look beautiful bald, whatever she thinks. And the comparison to Demi Moore and GI. Jane was not an unflattering one, because famously, she looked great bald, too, and she was super fit, and she's this awesome first woman Navy Seal. So it's like it's not a comparison that is denigrating her. No, I didn't think it was an insult. I didn't think he was going for it. I didn't think he was trying to embarrass her. There was nothing nasty about it. There's nothing unflattering about it. It was a really tame you could say that to a kid at a barbecue. Oh, look at G-I-J you know, there was no there was no nothing to embarrass her. Yeah. You know, and then people were bringing up, you know, like, history, or he's mentioned her before again, which I think is is irrelevant, unless it's unless it's, you know, because I didn't know that. I didn't know he mentioned her before or that they were fresh. I don't know any of that. If you look at, in the cold light of day, that joke that there was no need for outrage, and Will Smith laughed. He laughed. He laughed. A polite laugh. Yeah, I get it. Oh, yeah, funny. Yeah, whatever. There was no and then she rolled her eyes, and he obviously thought he had to do something. Obviously, I'm not a psychologist or a body language expert, but it seemed to me like he started strolling up there and he didn't know what he was going to do. I think he regretted it almost immediately, thinking, oh, I've got to do something now. And Chris Rock thinking what's he going to do? He could have run away and made a joke or begged at a laugh, but because he did nothing and stood there, now Will Smith got, oh, no, I've got to do something. And I think if you look at it, will Smith doesn't want to hit him. He doesn't want to hit him hard. He sort of leans back, so he nearly misses and just touches his well, that's what I initially found quite confusing, because that's why the thing that most interests me here is to kind of put ourselves in the room, because the room was powerfully confused. The room was an alternate universe. I mean, the behavior of the people in the room is genuinely startling to me. So I want to talk about what people thought they saw and how they processed all that. But just watching on TV or on the computer, I saw it looked like he barely made contact. Given Chris Rock's reaction, I mean, if he had slapped him with any force, given the way Chris was standing, he would have had to have taken a major step back or fallen back or a slap delivered delivered hard. Could have just knocked him flat. Right. Well, that's the other thing about it. Whether whatever the stat was, again, my initial thought was this was a six foot three man hitting a guy. I think he weighs probably about £140. Chris Rob. He's slight. He's a tiny guy. That's a bad look. Optically. Yeah. It didn't look fair. It looked like bullying. Whatever you think jokes are and what words are, they're not bullying compared to physical violence. That really started annoying me when people started saying, no, but words are actual violence. No, they're not. No, they're not. But given that, given how tenuous the slap was, I think people in the room could be forgiven up until that moment for thinking, oh, this must be a bit they've worked out. I thought it was. I knew although I'd seen the controversy before, us all the thing, and I still had to watch it a few times, thinking, Is it a bit? And then Chris Rock said, Will Smith just slap the shit on me. I thought, this isn't a bit. But even there, the only place it became crystal clear I would say to the people in the room that it wasn't a bit was when he got back to his seat and yelled, keep my wife's name out of your fucking mouth. And even the second it took the second time for the reality to dawn, I think, yeah. That looked like a man who was adrenalized. That looked like a man who was enjoying being a warrior. He enjoyed the violence because he felt that he'd he'd sort of won and he was angry and he was frustrated. I think he knew he shouldn't have done it. And I think that what made me do that. Why did I do that? What have I done? Well, that that I would question that, because his behavior for the rest of the night did not seem like somebody whose conscience was settling especially hard. No, because he'd got away with it. Yeah, but he thought he'd got away with it. Don't forget, a few minutes later, he just won Oscar. It was without that slap. This was the greatest night of his life. This was the greatest night of his career. He couldn't believe it. So all that other stuff, it was still without the slap. This was amazing. And they had all that adrenaline, and he's thinking, oh, it's okay. I've won an oscar. It's okay. It's like when a kid thinks, ah, I didn't get caught. They didn't see me. They didn't I'm I've got away with the sweets. They didn't see me. It was like that sort of feeling. He must have thought. And he was dancing, and I think he thought he'd done well. I think he thought he was shiverious. I think he thinks his wife and family were proud of him. So it's like he got some sort of affirmation and reward. You slap a man on stage. That's never happened before. I've never seen anything like it. As I say, it happens in bars around the world every night. It happens in sport and it happens in the playground, but it doesn't happen on the the greatest entertainment, arguably, in, you know, in the world, in tuxedos, that's that's it was weird. And in particular, let's maybe hit this point now, because at minimum, we need to get it out of the way. The norm that was violated here was crystal clear. The role of a comedian in that context is understood. Right. And you have occupied this role, that precise role, many, many times at award shows, with much more of a lacerating effect on the people in the audience. And you are the court jester who's given full license to roast the people in the audience. Yeah, but also more than that, chris Rock isn't just a presenter or an actor going up there and saying stuff. He's a comedian. Right. And this is hard to explain, but when you're on stage, that's your home. Right. That's a psychological and a physical barrier. If someone gets out of the seat and gets on your stage, that's a massive thing. That's a massive effect. That's like someone's just let himself into your house. Yeah. And he must have thought, oh, my God, but I can't act like I do when I'm on stage, so I haven't got the power. And there's no doubt that in that room, will Smith had the power, and he'd stepped on the stage. He was alpha. He was not only a bigger man, but he'd broken down all those barriers. He'd broken down all those unwritten laws. He should not have stepped on that stage without permission. So Chris Rock, his world was shattered. He did amazing. I can't believe I mean, he fluffed his line a little bit. He didn't know what was going on. And I think that I saw a thing where he said that. I think he was bullied, and he was in therapy for it, so this wasn't good for him to go through that. I can't imagine it. Maybe we'll come back to that. I think he handled himself totally impeccably, despite him getting flustered is totally understandable, and he was barely flustered, given the situation, and this is what I do want to get to. I think he was totally betrayed by the academy and the room, really. I mean, it was just amazing to me that that just the way the rest of the event unfolded, what should have happened. I agree. But don't forget, those people were a bit in shock, and they wanted to go back to normal. It's like they were in slight denial, and I think they had some sort of deferred responsibility, like that happened. We don't know what to do. This is normal again. Will Smith's winning an award, and he's crying. It's all normal. There's nothing to see here. It's okay. The world is not out of joint. Yeah, I know. I don't know what happened. I've heard two opposing reports that the first was they asked him to leave, and then people said, that isn't true. They didn't ask him to leave. In fact, I heard the producer asked him to stay, although I heard a quote from the producer saying that he said he poured concrete on the room. And I think that's a lovely way of putting it, because they must have been just weird. It must have been so strange, because, again, let's get it in contact. He didn't punch him, he didn't kick him, he didn't stab him, he didn't headbutt him, he didn't do anything. That would be traditionally a terrible assault of violence. But I tell you, getting a slap in front of everyone from a bigger man, it is violence. Let me just linger on that point for a second, because it does matter what he attempted to do, because, yes, a slap of any degree is violence and it's designed to obviously assert your power over someone and humiliate them, and it is bullying. All the ugliness is contained, even in the mere grazing gesture there. But if he tried to slap him hard and he just failed because Chris moved to the degree he did, it could have been a very different outcome, because you can knock someone senseless with a hard time. And I genuinely think that he didn't want to hurt him. I don't think he even wanted to slap him. I think he regretted it, walking up there, but he wanted to look like John Wayne. No one insults my woman. I can be a hero here. And I think he felt some sort of weird pressure to do it and he was in two minds and I don't think he is that guy. I don't think he's a violent person who wants to I think it was like he wanted to be like that for a minute, to impress someone, and it just I think it must have felt really weird for him. But about the slap, right? I was talking to a security guard once and I don't know if it's true for everyone, but he said, oh, if it goes to it, a slap is really good because it shocks them. And he said, It looks good in court, right. You don't break your hand, as one often does, punching someone on the head. And he said, Most people don't press charges because they are embarrassed to say, I was slapped by a man. Oh, wow. There is a sort of dislike machismo using that embarrassment and that dominance. But the reality is, if you slap them on the ear, you break their eardrum with good contact and you will completely lay them out, right? Of course you can knock someone out. You can really hurt someone. You can break their joy, you can do it. But there is absolutely no way he wanted to do that and he showed it. That slap wouldn't have hurt, but that's irrelevant. He wanted it to look like a slap. He wanted to shut up Chris Rock. He wanted to look like a hero. He wanted it to look like he had dominated and shut someone up, and he wanted it to be justified. And to some people, it was, and some people it still is. Yeah. That's so many conspiracy theories that they won't back down. They think that. But now it's been going on a week, and, I mean, I don't know how much longer it'd do or what is is punishment is or will be. Right. Well, so let's just let's just nail down the objective fact that many people gave voice to. And I think Kathy Griffin might have put it in a tweet that was most visible, but she said something like, oh, great. Now every comedian has to wonder whether someone wants to emulate Will Smith and jump up on stage. It's like, our job just got more dangerous. And I do think that is, whatever the extenuating circumstances, whatever you think about Will Smith, and whatever the cause of this or the the nature of Chris Rock's joke, that norm violation yeah. Is just bad. Right. Yeah. If if there isn't some sort of, you know, comeuppance or agreed distaste, then it would be dangerous. And and it's more dangerous because even though it would be very rare if a man with everything to lose is willing to do it what's people with nothing to lose exactly willing to do. People want to get famous for anything. People do anything to be first. So for this week, Will Smith is the most famous man in the world. This week, he has been the most famous man in the world. And some people will go, well, I can do that. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. An analogous situation, which is different, but it reveals the same problem here. I don't know if you've seen it. I think this has happened internationally, but there was this group of people that were hitting famous people they didn't like with pies, like, you know, like just fake pies, like shaving cream and a pie. Yeah. They did it here with milk. They threw milk over. Oh, that's right. I think we may even spoken about this at one point, but people who don't really think it through think that behavior is totally innocuous. It's just a social protest. You're just kind of embarrassing the person. It's just shaving cream or milk. What's the problem? But the real problem is it's a mock assassination, and you're showing the real lunatics of the world just how easy it is to go up and hit Bill Gates or Boris Johnson or somebody in the face, even when they have security around them. Right. So it's a bad meme to be putting out there, and it makes the lives of famous, controversial people just dangerous. I hadn't even thought of the extreme version of that. But even without that, I think it's still in the front. I think that is like a slap. It's done something to you. It's embarrassing. You covered in something you might have ruined your clothes, you're stuck in it. It really is inconvenience whether whether they've got a loophole around violence, you know, and one of our famous politicians years ago, John Prescott, he was a Northern sort of working class guy in the labor, right? And he was walking along and someone egged him, threw an egg at him, and he just turned around and punched him straight in the face. And I like that just because the egg leaves your hand in the eye is not an extension of your fist yet. No, exactly. And just like I talked about this, I think, with you before, that that dumb practical joke in school where they put a drawing pin attack on your chair and if you sat on it, they'd laugh because you did it. I go, no, that doesn't count. No, solve yourself of responsibility because I sat on a sharp object that you put there for me to sit on, that's still your fault. So I think you can play games all you like and try and get round. It's not as bad as a punch or whatever, but you can't do that. You can't do that. If that was paint on someone's house, they'd be done for criminal damage of vandalism. Okay? So let's jigger some of the variables here. If Will Smith had not been Will Smith, if he had been far less famous or just some anonymous creature who in a tuxedo, the outcome would have been obviously different. Right? Well, I assume he wouldn't have made it to the stage. If he was a seat filler who looked like he was walking on stage, and people looking at their notes going, what's this? This isn't in the script. And this truck went, I don't think he'd have made it. One would hope. I'm not so sure, but one would hope. But given that it was Will Smith, and given that he's that famous and people have so many positive associations with him, that's what made it so difficult to process, right? The moment you dial down his fame sufficiently, then it's just a straight up illegal act in plain view of millions of people. And this is completely anathema. The guy who's immediately arrested and has legal problems. Yeah, but that's a very good point as well, because I think that's what allowed him to do it as well, because it was Will Smith. I bet even producers thought, this is going to be funny, right? He's going to tease him, or they've done a bit they've worked out in the car park, we're not in on this or what's he going to do it's. All right. It's will Smith. What could go wrong? I know. Exactly. And then he slaps him and walks away. And they're going, okay, he did do something. It's too late. He's gone back to his chair. Okay. Chris rock's covering. Good. Now he's swearing. Oh, he's swearing again. I let all the organizers off for not acting quickly. Enough up to that point. Then I think then we don't know then what happens. But even then, he wins an award. He wins an oscar. Okay. The place where it goes completely off the rails for me, just tonally and just existentially is him winning the award, the contents and spin of his speech. Right. I didn't watch it because I didn't want to watch it because I didn't like the fact that he was winning an award and he was getting a standing ovation. So I didn't watch it, I'm afraid. I saw him cry, and I saw a clip of it. What did he say? How long was it? Was it like I think it's five or six minutes. Go. Well, the first thing I want to say is that I think it's appropriate to view I mean, again, I don't I don't know all the details of Will Smith's life and, you know, what has come before this. And, I mean, I just heard rumors of how complicated his relationship is with his wife and how colorful that has all been. Yeah. But I think when you look at how much he had to lose right. And what he decided to do in front of tens of millions of people, I think it's appropriate to view that whole episode as a kind of mental health crisis. Right. I saw the clip I saw of him crying and making it about the guy he played was the William sister's dad. I haven't seen the kill either. But did he make it about sort of protecting family to try and make what he just did, and he made it all about love, that he wants to be like a vessel of love, and he's a river to his people. So the text of it, he was obviously winging it in the moment because he was connecting it to what had just happened. But the broad strokes was that he apologized to everyone on Earth apart from Chris Rock, and he cast it all in terms of he's a protector of women and he's a river to his people. And it was the most self aggrandizing delusional. Well, he couldn't apologize because that would ruin it, because then he did something wrong. But you would think he was Gandhi. He was Gandhi who just had to be tough. Gandhi that one time right. That's like a superhero says, sorry you had to see that. Yeah. He wasn't apologizing for the violence. It's all in a day's work. I'm used to it. That might be a shock to you, but not to me. And he just takes off. He just takes off and flies away. Yeah, I know it was all about but it did again, it did look of a piece with a kind of mental health crisis. I guess that could be that's totally exculpatory on some level, just to say, the guy's having a breakdown. Cut him some slack. But I did sort of view it that way. Because the question is, do you locate the problem purely in his brain, or do you locate it in a kind of cultural confusion surrounding him? Because there's definitely some confusion because his son tweeted out, that's the way we do it. Nothing but pride and his dad. So there's a part of the culture that just didn't get how wrong the behavior was and is, and that's a kind of delusion that if you share it, is just morally confusing. The guy was a guy who just was stunning and confused. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app, The Making Sense. This podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I have been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week and I've actually been unsure about whether to record it at all. Frankly, conversation is the only tool we have for making progress. I firmly believe that. But many of the things we most need to talk about seem impossible to talk about. And I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I've been saying for years now that with social media we've all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent and it's not clear how it will turn out. And it's still not clear how it will turn out. But it's not looking good. It is fairly disorienting out there. All information has been weaponized, all communication has become performative, and on the most important topics it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time. We appear to be driving ourselves crazy, actually. Crazy as incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination and confirmation bias and then lashing out at one another on that basis. So I'd like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest and its possible political implications and other cultural developments and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. And I'm going to circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism because that really is at the center of this. And there's so much to talk about here and it's so difficult to talk about and there's so much we don't know, right? And yet most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago. I've been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now and perhaps lay the ground for something worse to come. And I've been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance, not because I haven't had anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if I feel that way, given the pains I've taken to insulate myself against those kinds of concerns, I know that almost anyone with a public platform must be terrified. Journalists and editors and executives, celebrities, everyone has to be terrified that they might take a wrong step here and never recover. And this is really unhealthy, not just for individuals but for society. Because again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. And if we can't reason with one another, there is no path forward other than violence, conversation or violence. So I'd like to talk about some of the things that concern me about our current state of communication. And unfortunately, many things are compounding our problems at the moment. We have a global pandemic which is still very much with us and remains to be seen how much our half hearted lockdown and our ineptitude and testing and our uncoordinated reopening. And now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the COVID-19 caseload to spike. We will definitely see, as many have pointed out, the virus doesn't care about economics or politics. It only cares that we keep breathing down each other's necks. And we've certainly been doing enough of that. Of course, almost no one can think about COVID-19 now. But I just like to point out that many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock on effects in the economy and now this protest movement, many of these costs are hidden from us. In addition to killing more than 100,000 people in the US, the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost. And the ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible effects, of course, but it is also an opportunity cost. And now this civil unrest and other recent events is compounding these problems. Whatever the merits of the protest may be or will be, the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering. In addition to all the tangible effects of what's happening the injury and death, the lost businesses, the burn buildings, the neighborhoods that won't recover for years in many cities, the education's put on hold and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution. Just think about all the good and important things we cannot do, cannot even think of doing now and perhaps won't contemplate doing for many years to come. Because we'll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called normal life. Of course, normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise. And the disparities in wealth and health and opportunity we've gotten used to in this country and that so much of our politics and ways of doing business seem to take for granted are just unconscionable. There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth. And what we're seeing now is clearly a response to that. But it's a confused and confusing response. And worse, it's a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation. And this makes it dangerous. This isn't just politics and human suffering on display. It's philosophy. It's ideas about truth and about what it means to say that something is true. What we're witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we're attempting to have with one another in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what's going on in the world? What is real? If we can't agree about what is real or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we're stuck with one another. So what's happening here? Well, again, it's hard to say what is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him as a cog in the machinery of systemic racism. Is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics? Or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society? Or is it both? It's not entirely clear and the most concrete terms. What we're experiencing is widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed to the black community by racist cops and racist policies. And this unrest has drawn a counter response from law enforcement, much of which, ironically, is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence both real and perceived. And many of the videos we've seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous. Some of this footage has been unbelievable, and this is one of the many vicious circles we have to find a way to interrupt. Again, there's so much to be confused about here. We've seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters, and yet we've also seen video of police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them and simultaneously trying to teach a lesson to the rest of society by letting crime and mayhem just spread elsewhere in the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? How representative are these videos of what is actually going on? Is there much less chaos actually occurring than it's being advertised to us? Again, it's very hard to know. What's easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. And it seems to me we've long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous. And now I think they have. The amount of misinformation in the air, the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non sequiturs, is just astonishing. And it's important to keep in mind that with the presidential election coming in November, the stakes are really high. As most of you know, I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy. And I believe the last two weeks have been very good for him politically, even when everything else has seemed to go very badly for him. I know the polls don't say this a large majority of people seem to disapprove of his handling of the crisis so far, but I think we all know now to take poles with a grain of salt. There's a very real problem of preference falsification, especially in an environment of intense social pressure. People will often say what they think is politically acceptable and then think or say or do something very different in private, like when they're alone in a voting booth. Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy. Right. According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn't make a lot of sense, and a lot can happen in the next few months, right? The last few weeks feel like a decade. And my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law and order president, that may be his path to reelection, if such a path exists. Now, of course, this crisis has revealed yet again just how unfit he is to be president. I mean, the man could not strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it, and the fate of the country has depended on it. And I also think it's possible that these protests wouldn't even be happening but for the fact that Trump is president. Whether or not the problem of racism has actually gotten worse in our society, having Trump as president surely makes it seem like it has. It has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency that for many people, it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant. So all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November. But before this social unrest, our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. And now he's been given a very different battle to fight it's. A battle against left wing orthodoxy, which is growing more stifling by the minute, and civil unrest. Right. And if our social order phrase sufficiently, restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November. Just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically. Now, things can change very, very quickly, and to call a basic concern about law and order racist isn't going to wash. Now, as I said, trust in institutions has totally broken down. We've been under a very precarious lockdown for more than three months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They've been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public health officials and news anchors by the thousands signing open letters, making public statements saying it's fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy, especially so given that the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It's a totally rational question to ask, but the question itself is taboo now. So it seems to me that almost everything appears upside down at the moment. And before I get into the details of police violence, I just want to attempt to close the door to a few misunderstandings. Let's start with the proximate cause of all this the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. I'll have a lot more to say about this in a minute, but nothing I say should detract from the following observation that video was absolutely sickening, and it reveals a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by. In particular, the actions of Derek Chauvin, the cop who kept his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes. His actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there's no question he should be prosecuted. And he is being prosecuted. He's been indicted for second degree murder and manslaughter, and I suspect he'll spend many, many years in prison. And this is not to say that the system is working right. It certainly seems possible that without that cell phone video and the resulting public outrage, chauvin might have gotten away with it, to say nothing of the other cops who were with him and who are now being prosecuted. And if this is true, we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police. So, as I said, I'm going to return to this topic because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video and from videos like it. But let me just echo everyone's outrage over what happened. This is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent. Now, on the general topic of racism in America, I want to make a few similarly clear and preemptive statements. Racism is still a problem in American society, no question. And slavery, which was racism's most evil expression, was this country's founding sin. And we should also add the near total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race and the legacy of these crimes, crimes that were perpetrated for centuries remains a cause for serious moral concern today. I have no doubt about this, and nothing I'm about to say should suggest otherwise. And I don't think it's an accident that the two groups I just mentioned, african Americans and Native Americans, suffer the worst from inequality in America today. How could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects, given the nature of that history? And if anything good comes out of the current crisis, it will be because we managed to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all of its dimensions. The real debate to have is about how to do this economically and politically. But the status quo that many of us take for granted is a betrayal of our values, whether we realize it or not. If it's not a betrayal of your values now, it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person. And if you don't manage that, it will be a betrayal of your kids values when they're old enough to understand the world they're living in. The difference between being very lucky in our society and very unlucky should not be as enormous as it is. However, the question that interests me, given what has been true of the past and what is now true of the present, is what should we do next? What should we do to build a healthier society? What should we do next, tomorrow, next week? Obviously, I don't have the answers, but I'm very worried that many of the things we're doing now and seem poised to do will only make our problems worse. And I'm especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this, right? I'm just trying to have conversations. I'm just trying to figure these things out in real time with other people. And there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous. And think about the politics of this endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses that were struggling to survive during this pandemic. And seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Looting and burning businesses and assaulting their owners isn't social justice. It isn't even social protest. It's crime. And having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump. And it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible. It always seems somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we're living in Weimar Germany. I've had many conversations about this. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast, and he's been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the US for several years now. And I've known in the abstract that democracies can destroy themselves. But the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me. It really doesn't anymore. Of course, what we've been seeing in the streets isn't just one thing. And some people are protesting for reasons I fully defend, right? They're outraged by specific instances of police violence, like the killing of George Floyd. And they're worried about creeping authoritarianism, which we really should be worried about now. And they're convinced that our politics is broken because it is broken. And they're deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and to the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society, and they recognize that we have a president who is an incompetent, divisive con man and a crackpot at a time when we actually need wise leadership. Now, all of that is hard to put on a sign, but it's all worth protesting. However, it seems to me that most protesters are seeing this moment almost exclusively through the lens of identity politics, and racial identity politics in particular. And some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order, or at least remaining nonjudgmental about it. And you could see in the early days of this protest, news anchors take that line on CNN, for instance, talking about the history of social protests. Sometimes it has to be violent, right? What do you think all these protests need to be nonviolent? Those words came out of Chris Cuomo's mouth and Don Lemon's mouth. Many people have been circulating a half quote from Martin Luther King Jr. About riots being the language of the unheard. They're leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed that riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists. And there are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police. Now, this may be psychologically understandable when you've spent half the day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I'll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind. Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime and solve crimes when they occur and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system is the necessary precondition for almost anything else we value in society. Now, we need police reform. Of course, there are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing and its hiring practices and training and the militarization of so many police forces and outside oversight and how police departments deal with corruption, the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job. And yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks that we can do without the police, or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. Sure. We should have psychologists and social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill. Perhaps we're giving cops jobs they shouldn't be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we're witnessing now is a matter of the cops being overresourced, that we've given them too much training, that we've made the job too attractive so that the people we're recruiting are of too high equality. Right? That doesn't make any sense. And what's been alarming here is that we're seeing prominent people in government, in the media, in Hollywood, in sports, speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society and of society itself is a form of progress, and any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression. At one point, the woman who's running the city council in Minneapolis that just decided to abolish the police force was asked by a journalist, I believe, on CNN, well, what do I do if someone's breaking into my house in the middle of the night? Who do I call? Right? And her first response to that question was, you need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is. Now, she's had to walk that back because it's one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said. But this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone's breaking into your house and you're terrified and you want a police force that can respond, that that fear is a symptom of white privilege. That's where democratic politics goes to die. And again, what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response and the acceptance of that response on the part of many millions of Americans. I mean, if you step back from this, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air, and it's destroying institutions. It's destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information. Universities, the press. I mean, the New York Times in recent days seems to be preparing for a full self immolation. What's happening is that no one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable, certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It's just become too dangerous. I mean, there are people being fired for tweeting all Lives Matter hashtag all lives Matter in the current environment is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. That's how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the La galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted. Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People who have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world, or young people who fear they never will. People who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops, people by the millions, are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself, eager to make honest contact with reality. And on top of that, we find extraordinarily privileged people, whatever the color of their skin. People who are living wonderful lives in gated communities or Fifth Avenue apartments and who feel damn guilty about it. These people are also supporting this movement uncritically for many reasons. Of course they care about other people, and I'm sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do. But they are also supporting this movement because it promises an expiation of their sins. If you have millions of dollars and you shoot Botox into your face and you vacation on St. Bart's and you're a liberal, the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as AOC. And just like everything she tweets, the truth is, the problem isn't just with the looting and the arson and the violence. There are problems with these peaceful protests themselves. Of course, I'm not questioning anyone's right to protest. Even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right. What she did is the DC police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church, awkwardly holding a Bible as though he had never held a book in his life. The problem with the protests is that they are animated to a remarkable degree, by confusion and misinformation, and I'll explain why I think that's the case. And of course, this will be controversial. And needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. I could have invited any number of great black intellectuals onto this podcast to make these points for me, but that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Lowry, John McWhorter, Thomas Chattered, and Williams. Coleman Hughes, Camille Foster. These guys might not agree with everything I'm about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I'm now stepping out on far more credibly than I can. But you see, that's part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person's skin or even his life experience matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. But for the discussion, we really need to have the color of a person's skin and even his life experience, simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break the spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything. Okay? As I've already acknowledged, there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we are still struggling to outgrow. That is obvious. There are real racists out there, and there are ways in which racism became institutionalized a long time ago. Many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic, the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different, and this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones. Now, whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not, I don't know, but it was effectively racist. Nothing I'm about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts. There just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them. So criminal justice reform is absolutely essential. And I'm not denying that many black people, perhaps most, have had interactions with cops and other people in positions of power or even random strangers that seem unambiguously racist. Sometimes this is because they're actually in the presence of racism. And perhaps sometimes it only seems that way. I've had unpleasant encounters with cops and customs officers and TSA screeners and bureaucrats of every kind, and even with people in stores or restaurants, right? People aren't always nice or ethical. But being white and living in a majority white society, I've never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I encountered another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that is one form of white privilege. So nothing I'm about to say denies that we should condemn racism, whether interpersonal or institutional, wherever we find it. But as a society, we simply can't afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn't exist. And we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that. The more progress we make on issues of race, the less racism there will be to find and the more likely we'll be to find ourselves merely chasing after its ghost. And the truth is, we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America. This isn't 1920 and it isn't 1960. We had a two term black president. We have black congressmen and women. We have black mayors and black chiefs of police. They're major cities like Detroit and Atlanta going on their fifth or 6th consecutive black mayor. Having more black people in positions of real power in what is still a majority white society is progress on the problem of racism. And the truth is it might not even solve the problem we're talking about. I mean, when Freddie Gray was killed in Baltimore, virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black. The problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated, as we're about to see. But obviously there's more work to do on the problem of racism. And more important, there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race and will still be correlated with race even after the last racist has been driven from our shores. The question of how much of today's inequality is due to existing racism, whether racist people or racist policies, is a genuinely difficult question to answer. And to answer it, we need to distinguish the past from the present. Take wealth inequality, for example. The. Median white family has a net worth of around $170,000. These data are a couple of years old, but I think they're pretty close to what's true. Now, the median black family has a net worth of around $17,000. So we have a tenfold difference in median wealth. Now, that's the median, not the mean. So half of white families are below $170,000 and half above. Half of black families are below $17,000 and half above. And we're talking about wealth here, not income. And this disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10% of the income distribution. For whites, in the top 10% for income, the median net worth is $1.8 million. For blacks, it's around $350,000. Now, there are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth. It seems that black families who make into the top 10% of the distribution fall out more easily than white families do. But it's also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance. Now, how much of this inequality is due to the legacy of slavery? And how much of it is due to the ensuing century of racist policies? I'm prepared to think quite a lot, and it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here. Of course, one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans, and then one wonders where all this ends, right? And what about blacks who aren't descended from slaves, but who still suffered some consequences of racism? In listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic, I'm inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy. But the truth is, I'm genuinely unsure about this. Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth. And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts. And the problem with the social activism we're now seeing, what John McWhorter calls the new religion of antiracism, is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It's almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic and perversely. They may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group, even a group that has a long history of real victimization. The imprecision here, the bad faith arguments, the double standards, the goalpost shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times, the defenestrations on social media, the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced. I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society and to effective liberal politics and to the welfare of African Americans. So with that as preamble, let's return to the tragic death of George Floyd. As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So people of any race are right to be horrified by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this, because there are very likely a few trip wires installed there, and I'm about to hit some of them. So just do your best to remain calm. Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States? Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States? In other words, do we have reason to believe that had Floyd been white, he wouldn't have died in a similar way? Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years of black men being killed by cops, do they prove or even suggest that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men, and that this violence is motivated by racism? Now, most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that even to pose them as I just did is obscene. When the answer is yes, and it's a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets. The problem, however, is that if you take even five minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence, the answer really appears to be no in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I'm not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990, but in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US. And so has the police use of deadly force. And as you're about to see, the police use more deadly force against white people, both in terms of absolute numbers and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society. But the public perception is, of course, completely different. In a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30 year low for police shootings. Think about that. Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles peacefully and violently do the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds, in many cases, businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods do the people who cause so much damage to the city that certain neighborhoods will take years and probably decades to recover. Do the celebrities who supported them and even bailed them out of jail? Do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30 year low for police shootings in Los Angeles? Now before I step further out over the abyss here, let me reiterate. Many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I'm about to say. You're not going to like the way it sounds. You're especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy. This feeling of not liking, this feeling of outrage, this feeling of disgust, this feeling of sam what the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you even touching this topic? This feeling isn't an argument. It isn't or shouldn't be the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world. Your capacity to be offended isn't something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn't something that you should respect. In fact it's something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind this feeling can mislead you. If you care about justice, and you absolutely should you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn't the case. It cannot be the case that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be most offended by conversation itself. So I'm going to speak in the language of facts now insofar as we know them. All the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people's assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong and that should matter to you. So just take a moment to think this through with me. How many people are killed each year in America by cops? If you don't know, guess right. See if you have any intuition for these numbers because your intuitions determine how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis. The answer for many years running is about a 1000. 1000 people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year and about 10 million arrests. That's down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually through the 90s. So of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police and the police decide to make an arrest about 1000 of those people die as a result. I'm sure a few people get killed when there's no arrest attempted but that has to be a truly tiny number. So without knowing anything else about the situation if the cops decide to arrest you it is reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around one in 10,000. Now of course in the United States it's higher than it is in other countries. So I'm not saying this number is acceptable but it is what it is for a reason. As we're about to see now there are a few generic points I want to make before we get further into these data and they should be uncontroversial. First, it's almost certainly the case that of these 1000 officer caused deaths each year some are entirely justified, right? It may even be true that most are entirely justified and some are entirely unjustified. And some are much harder to judge. And that will be true next year and the year after that. Of the unjustified killings there are vast differences between them. Many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily it might have been a terrible misunderstanding or incompetence or just bad luck. In certain cases, it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he's become enraged or he's just a psychopath, right? And it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings. Another point that should be uncontroversial but may sound a little tone deaf in the current environment after we've been inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests. But this has to be acknowledged whenever we're discussing this topic. Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment they have an almost impossible job. If you're making 10 million arrests every year some number of people will decide not to cooperate. Now, there are many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill or drunk or on drugs and of course rather often the person is an actual criminal who simply doesn't want to be arrested. And among innocent people and perhaps this is getting more common these days a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do ethically or politically or perhaps as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes. He did nothing wrong. Why are the cops arresting him? I don't know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race, but I can well imagine that if it's common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out, for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police. That could lead to greater levels of non compliance, which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. And this is certainly one reason why it's wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it's policing. Now, unfortunately there's no evidence that this reduces lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is the likely explanation for police behavior which itself might reduce conflict. Now, when a cop goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest that person's resistance poses a problem that most people don't seem to understand. If you haven't studied this topic, if you don't know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven't thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt, one attempting to do that, a gun that can be grabbed and used against you or against a member of the public, then your intuitions about what makes sense here, tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad. If you haven't trained with firearms under stress, if you don't know how suddenly situations can change, if you haven't experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon. If you don't know how hard it is to shoot a moving target, or even a stationary one, when your heart is beating out of your chest, you very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can expect from cops in situations like these. And there's another fact that looms over all this. Like the angel of Death. Literally, most cops do not get the training they need. They don't get the hand to hand training they need. They don't have good skills with which to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects and cops don't get the firearms training they need. Of course, many police departments have elite units, but most cops don't have the training they need to do the job they're being asked to do. It's also true, no doubt, that some cops are racist bullies and there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys and cover up police misconduct generally, whether it's born of racism or not. But the truth is that even if we got rid of all the bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people, the best possible training, and we give them the best culture in which to think about their role in society. And we give them the best methods for de escalating, potentially violent situations, which we absolutely must do. And we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem just and necessary. So the war on drugs is obviously over. Even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter or father or mother or brother or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen. So while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand there are very likely always going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable or inexplicably stupid that results in an innocent person's death or not so innocent person's death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year, and we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped. Now, I'm about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence, but I want to just put it to you now. If we're going to let the health of race relations in this country or the relationship between the community and the police depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again, the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed. About a week into these protests, I heard Van Jones on CNN say, if we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge. Now, he said this not as an indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police, with 10 million arrests each year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is. We have to put these videos into context and we have to acknowledge how different they are from one another. Some of them are easy to interpret, but some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people, especially by activists. And there are a range of cases, some have video associated with them and some don't, that are now part of a litany of antiracist outrage. And the names of the dead are in toned as though they were all evidence of the same injustice, and yet they are not. Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight and he got out of his car and tried to flee. There might have been a brief struggle over the officer's taser. That part of the video isn't clear. But what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away. That was insane. There was zero reason for the cop to feel that his life was under threat at that moment. And for that unjustified shooting, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. I'm not sure that was long enough, actually. That seemed like straight up murder to me. The George Floyd video, while even more disturbing to watch, is harder to interpret. I don't know anything about Derek Chauvin, the cop who knelt on his neck. It's quite possible he's a terrible person who should have never been a cop. He seems to have a significant number of complaints against him, though as far as I know, the details of those complaints haven't been released. And he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop, or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping a knee on their neck. I don't know. I'm sure more facts will come out. But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. And think about it, he was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It's possible, of course, but it doesn't seem like the likeliest explanation for his behavior. What I believe we saw in that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training on the part of those cops or terrible recruitment. It's possible that none of these guys should have ever been cops. I think for one of them, it was only his fourth day on the job. Just imagine that. Just imagine all the things you don't know when you're a new cop. And it could also have been a function of bad luck. In terms of Floyd's underlying health. It was reported that he was complaining about being unable to breathe even before Chauvin pinned him with his knee. And the truth is, the knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death. It could have been the weight of the other officer pinning him down. This is almost certainly what happened in the case of Eric Garner. It seems that half the people on earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric Garner to death in that video. That does not appear to be what happened. When Eric Garner is saying, I can't breathe, he's not being choked. He's being held down on the pavement by several officers. Now, being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person, especially someone with lung or heart disease. In the case of Eric Garner, it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him was no longer choking him. If you doubt that, watch the video again. And if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the video that shows the killing of Tony Timpa. It's also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos. Now, Tony Temple was a white man in Dallas who was suffering some mental health emergency and I think cocaine intoxication, and he actually called 911 himself. And what we see is the body cam footage from the police which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived. A security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over and they restrain Tempa on the ground by rolling him onto his stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner, and they keep their weight on him. One cop has a knee on his upper back, which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck, but they crush the life out of him all the same over the course of 13 minutes. He's not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There's no animus between them and Tempa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe they're responding to a mental health emergency, but they keep him down on his belly, under their weight, and they're cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he's going to be dead by the end of this video makes their jokes seem pretty callous. But the truth is, this was about as benign an imposition of force by the cops as you're going to see. And the crucial insight you'll have watching this video is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Tempa, they don't take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they're doing is perfectly safe, perfectly within protocol. They've probably done this a hundred times before. Now, if you watch that video, and again, fair warning, it's disturbing. But imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Tempa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Tempa's skin. That video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way, it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crush the life out of a black Tony Timpa. Given the nature of our conversation about violence, given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching, and it would not have been a lynching. Now, I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of the cops in Minneapolis, and perhaps we'll learn more at trial, and perhaps there'll be a tape of Chauvin using the N word in another context, and that'll bring a credible allegation of racism into the case. And it seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his behavior. But most people who saw that video believe they have witnessed with their own eyes, beyond any possibility of doubt, a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man. That's not what that video necessarily shows. As I said, these videos can be hard to interpret, even while seeming very easy to interpret. And these cases, whether they have associated video or not are very different. The Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there's no video of that encounter. But if true, that is an entirely different situation. If you're attacking a cop trying to get his gun, that is a life and death struggle almost by definition for the cop, and in most cases it will justify a lethal use of force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of antiracist moral outrage is simply not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct. I've seen many videos of people getting arrested, and I've seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be the inappropriate use of force by the cops. One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don't understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos and from the public reaction to them, this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don't get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody for whatever reason, it's not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match, you're very likely to get injured or killed. This is a point that I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Lowry, and essentially it became a public service announcement and I've gone back and listened to those comments and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand, and it's something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly. If you put your hands on a cop, if you start wrestling with a cop or grabbing him because he's arresting your friend or pushing him or striking him or using your hands in a way that can possibly be interpreted as you are reaching for a gun, you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin. As I said, when you're with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open, and any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn't know what you're going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. And most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person for good reason, because they're not very well trained to do that. And they're continually confronting people who are bigger or younger or more athletic or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They're ordinary people with insufficient training. And once things turn physical, they can't afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer. The benefit of the doubt. And this is something that people seem totally confused about if they see a video of someone fighting with a cop and punching him or her in the face, right. And the person's unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back and that any use of deadly force at that point would be totally disproportionate. But that's not how violence works. It's not the cop's job to be the best bare knuckled boxer on earth so that he doesn't have to use his gun. A cop can't risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out because there's always a gun in play, right. So this is the cop's perception of the world and it's a justifiable one, given the dynamics of human violence. Now, you might think that cops shouldn't carry guns, right? Why can't we just be like England? And that's a point that can be debated, but it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns in circulation, the United States is not England. Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It's not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know that you didn't do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I'm going to ask that again. How could the fact that you're innocent, that you're not a threat to the cop, that you're not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment? He's attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest, and unless you called the cops yourself, you never really know what situation you're in. If I'm walking down the street, I don't know if a cop who's approaching me didn't just get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I mean, I know I didn't do anything. I know that I'm mystified as to why the cop is paying attention to me at that moment. But I don't know what's in the cop's head. The time to find out what's going on, the time to complain about racist cops, the time to scream at them and tell them they're all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct is after cooperating at the police station in the presence of a lawyer, preferably, but to not comply. In the heat of the moment when a guy with a gun is issuing commands. This raises your risk astronomically. And it's something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they're not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested. OK, end of public service announcement. The main problem with using individual cases where black men and women have been killed by. Cops. To conclude that there's an epidemic of racist police violence in our society is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them. In 2016, John McWhorter wrote a piece for Time magazine about this, and here's a snippet of what he wrote. Quote the heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters. That has seemed plausible to me. And I've recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam De Bose, and others. End quote. So Mcwarter issued that challenge, as he said, and he was presented with the cases. But there's no song about these people admonishing us to say their names. And the list of white names is longer, and I don't know any of them other than Tony Timpa. I know the black names in addition to the ones I just read from McWater's article. I know the names of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. And now, of course, I know the name of George Floyd. And I'm aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops. I know the name of Brianna Taylor. I can't name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these other than Tempa. And I just read McWater's article where he lists many of them. So this is also a distortion in the media, right? The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops. Activists are not demanding that they do this, right? I'm sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot. Who knows? But in terms of the story we're telling ourselves in the mainstream, we're not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence. So back to the data again. Cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25% are black. About 50% are white. Now, the data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind, but they've been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources like The Washington Post, at least for the last five years or so. And this ratio between black and white appears stable over time and again. Many of these killings are justifiable right. We're talking about career criminals who are usually armed and in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren't the cases we're worried about. We're worried about the unjustified homicides. Now, some people will think these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. After all, African Americans are only 13% of the population, so at most they should be 13% of the victims of police violence, not 25%. And any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism. Okay, well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts. Blacks are 13% of the population, but they commit at least 50% of the murders and other violent crimes. If you have 13% of the population responsible for 50% of the murders, and in some cities committing two thirds of all violent crime, what percent of police attention should it attract? I honestly don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's not just 13%. And given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I'm pretty sure that most black people wouldn't set the dial at 13% either. And here we arrive somewhere near the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black on black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black on white crime. But for more than a generation, it really has not been much of a story of white on black crime. Now, the murder rate has come down steadily since the 1990s, with only minor upticks. But nationwide, blacks are six times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities, their risk is double that. And around 95% of these murders are committed by members of the African American community. The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide, when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community, 92 people were shot and 27 killed in Chicago alone, one city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this type of violence is far more representative of the kind of violence the black community needs to worry about. And ironically, it's clear that one remedy for this violence would be effective policing. Now, these are simply the facts of crime in our society as best we understand them. And the police have to figure out how to respond to these facts professionally and ethically. And the question is, are they doing that? And obviously, there's considerable doubt that they're doing that professionally and ethically. But Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist whose work I once discussed with Glenn Lowry on the podcast, he studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force. His paper is titled this is from 2016 an Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of force. And Fryer is black. And he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there's an epidemic of lethal police violence directed against black men especially. But he didn't find that. However, he did find support for the idea that black people suffer more non lethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do. So let's look at this. The study examined data from ten major police departments in Texas, Florida, and California. Generally, Fryer found that there's a 25% greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones, cuffing them or forcing them to the ground, or using other nonlethal force. Specifically in New York City. In encounters where black and white citizens were matched for other characteristics. They found that cops were 17% more likely to go hands on black suspects, 18% more likely to push them into a wall, 16% more likely to put them in handcuffs in a situation where they weren't being arrested, 18% more likely to push them to the ground, 25% more likely to use pepper spray or a baton, 19% more likely to draw their guns, and 24% more likely to point a gun at them. So this is more or less the full continuum of violence, short of using lethal force. And it seems, based on the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. So what accounts for this disparity racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it's inconvenient to note from other data that suggests that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. I'm not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that. Are there other explanations? Well, again, it could be that blacks are less cooperative with the police, and if so, this would be worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force. Now, whatever is true here is something that we should want to understand. And it's all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands on these suspects with or without an arrest, for whatever reason. It's easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism, whether or not racism is the underlying motive. And it's totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And given the level of crime in the black community, it seems that a disproportionate number of innocent black men are guaranteed to have this experience. Right? And it's totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle we have to find some way to interrupt. But Friar also found that black suspects are around 25% less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations where an officer was not first attacked but nevertheless fired his weapon at a suspect, the police seem more likely to do this when the suspect is white. Again, these data are incomplete. This doesn't cover every city in the country, and a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But as far as I know, the best data we have suggests that for whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted. And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And given the data we have, it seems undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, again both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society. Now, can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic, and our response to it has been totally inept. And on top of that, we're now being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a fullon economic depression. And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing several horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics, and these videos will keep coming. And the truth is, they could probably be matched two for one with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way in light of the belief that the data run the other way? People are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting the civil unrest from the sidelines because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video. Now, as I hope I've made clear, we need police reform, right? There's no question about this. And some of the recent footage of the police attacking the peaceful protests is totally outrageous. Nothing I just said should signify that. I'm unaware of that. I mean, from what I've seen, and again, by the time I released this podcast, the character of this might have changed somewhat. But from what I've seen, the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime, at least in the beginning. I mean, in many cities, they just stood by and watched society unravel, and then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protest. This is a terrible combination. It is the worst combination. There is no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear on all sides. But racializing, how we speak about the problem of police violence where race isn't actually the relevant variable, again, think Tony Timpa. This has highly negative effects. First, it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics. For instance, you take the recent case of Brianna Taylor, who was killed in a so called no knock raid of her home. As occasionally happens in this carnival of moral error we call the war on drugs. The police had the wrong address and they kicked in the wrong door, and they wound up killing a totally innocent woman. But the truth is, this had nothing to do with race. The problem is not, as some commentators have alleged, that it's not safe to be sleeping while black. The problem is that these no knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably, stupid laws. White people die under precisely these same circumstances and very likely in greater numbers. I don't have data specifically on no knock raids, but we can assume the ratio is probably conserved here. Just think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread. If someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night and you're a gun owner, of course you're going to reach for your gun. That's why you have a gun in the first place. And the fact that someone bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might have yelled police or might have not yelled police, it's alleged in some of these cases that they don't yell anything. The fact that someone yells police isn't necessarily convincing, right? Anyone can yell police. And again, think of the psychology of this. If the police have the wrong house. And you know there's no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you, especially in the middle of the night, because you know you've done nothing wrong. You're not the guy running a meth lab, and now you're reaching for your gun in the dark. Of course someone is likely to get killed, but this is not a racial issue. It's a terrible policy. Now, unfortunately, the process of police reform isn't straightforward, and it's made more complicated by the kinds of things that are happening now. Yes, we will be urging police reform in a very big way. Now, that seems clear. But Roland Fryer has also shown that investigations of cops in a climate where viral videos and racial politics are operating have dramatic effects and dramatically negative effects. And he studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and Laquan McDonald. And he found that for reasons that are pretty easy to intuit, proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically, sometimes by as much as 100%, once these investigations get started. This is now called the Ferguson effect, right? And the police still answer 911 calls, but they don't investigate suspicious activity in the same way they don't want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. And Friar estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into a thousand extra homicides and almost 40,000 more felonies over the next 24 months in the US. And of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. Now, one shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we're about to see nationwide. I'm sure the morale among cops has never been lower. I think it's almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force, and it's going to be much more difficult to recruit good people to the police force. I mean, who's going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealistic about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards. I'm pretty sure there's a difference there. I think we're likely to see that difference expressed now in the future. It's a grim picture unless we do something very creative here. So there's a real question about how we can reform police departments and get rid of bad cops without negatively impacting the performance of good cops. That's a riddle we have to solve, or at least we have to understand what the trade offs are here. And why is all this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down, and they are very rare events. They are one in 10,000 level events if measured by arrests, and one in 50 to 60,000 level events if measured by police encounters. And the number of unarmed people who are killed by cops is much smaller than that. Right. Of the thousand people killed by cops last year, around 50 were unarmed. And again, there were more white people killed than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent, right? Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops. Again, the data don't tell a clean story or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that African Americans get more attention from the cops, though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don't know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, it seems, which is bad. But again, it's simply unclear that racism is the cause of that. And contrary to everyone's expectations, it seems that whites are more likely to get killed by cops. Actually, one factor seems to be that whites are seven times more likely to commit what's called suicide by cop, and they're actually three times more likely to commit suicide generally. What's going on there? Who knows? There's a lot we don't understand about these data. But ask yourself, would society seem less racist to you if the disparity ran the other way is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed? A form of white privilege is a higher level of suicide by cop, and suicide generally a form of white privilege. We have a problem here that read either way, you could tell a starkly racist narrative. We need ethical, professional policing, of course. Right. But the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it. Is there any doubt about that. I mean, in a city like Milwaukee, blacks are twelve times more likely to get murdered than whites. And again, they're being killed by other African Americans nearly 100% of the time. I think the lowest figure I've seen is 93% of the time. What should the police do about this? And what are they likely to do now? Now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct? So we need to lower the temperature on this conversation and many other conversations and to understand what is actually happening in our society. But instead of doing this, we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos. Everything I just said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands. But I think what we're witnessing in our streets and on social media and even in the mainstream press, is a version of mass hysteria. And the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won't be evidence to the contrary. And there will be another video, right? There are 10 million arrests every year. There will always be another video. The media have turned these videos into a form of political pornography, and this has deranged us. We're now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has truly been poisoned by bad incentives in this regard, and social media doubly so now. In the mainstream of this protest movement, it's very common to hear that the only problem with what's happening in our streets, apart from what the cops are doing, is that some criminal behavior at the margins, a little bit of looting, a little bit of violence has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism. And most people in the media have taken exactly this position, right? People like Anderson Cooper on CNN or the editorial page of The New York Times or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden. The most prominent liberal voices in our society believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral sense and perfect political sense, and that movements like Black Lives Matter are guaranteed to be on the right side of history. How could anyone who's concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way? How could anyone who isn't himself racist not support Black Lives Matter? But of course, there is a difference between slogans and reality. There's a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims. And this can be genuinely confusing. And that's why propaganda works, right? For instance, many people assume that there's nothing wrong with antifa because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as antifascist. What could be wrong with being antifascist? Are you pro fascism? There's a similar problem with black. Lives matter, though. Happily, unlike antifa, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I'm discussing is more ideological, and it's much bigger than Black Lives Matter, but BLM is the most visible symbol of this movement. The wider issue is that we are in the midst of a moral panic, and it's been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations and have a legitimate fear of being hounded into oblivion online. So this is nearly everyone left of center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America, and we're making ourselves sick, right? We are damaging our society, and by protesting the wrong thing, even the slightly wrong thing, and unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process, looting that doesn't even have a pretense of protest, the left is empowering Trump, whatever the polls currently show. And if we're worried about Trump's authoritarian ambitions, as I think we really should be, this is important to understand. He recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House. I don't know if we found out who those guys actually were, but that was genuinely alarming. But how are Democratic calls to abolish the police going to play in half the country that just watched so many cities getting looted? We have to vote Trump out of office to restore the integrity of our institutions. And we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality, a problem which affects the black community most of all. We need police reform, we need criminal justice reform, we need tax reform, we need healthcare reform, we need environmental reform. We need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce inequality in our society. And if we did this, African Americans would benefit perhaps more than any other group. But it's not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society. And just ask yourself, what would real progress on the problem of racism look like? What would utter progress look like? Well, here's what I think it would look like. More and more people, and ultimately all people, would care less and less and ultimately not at all about race. As I've said, in various places, skin color would become like hair color in its political and moral significance, which is to say it would have none. Now, maybe you don't agree with that, aspiration maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can't be outgrown or shouldn't be outgrown. Well, if you think that, I'm afraid I don't know what to say to you. It's not that there's nothing to say. It's just that there's so much we disagree about morally and politically, that I don't know where to begin. So that debate, if it can even be had, will have to be left for another time. For the purposes of this conversation, I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here, which is to say you share the hope that there will come a time when the color of a person's skin really doesn't matter. What would that be like? Well, how many blondes got into Harvard this year? Does anyone know what percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette? Do we have enough redheads in senior management in our Fortune 500 companies? No one is asking these questions, and there's a reason for that. No one cares. And we are right not to care. Imagine a world in which people cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care or seem to care, or imagine that others care, or allege that they secretly care about skin color. Imagine a world in which discrimination by hair color was a thing and it took centuries to overcome, and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society, even where it no longer exists. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an absolute catastrophe. Now, the analogy isn't perfect for a variety of reasons, but it's good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and antiracism were truly broken. The future we want is not one in which we've all become passionate antiracists. It's not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult, the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn't age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don't agree with that what did you think Martin Luther King, Jr. Was talking about? And finally, if you're on the left and you don't agree with that if you don't agree with this vision of a post racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race and that racial identity is indesoluble and that skin color really matters and will always matter. These people are white supremacists and neo Nazis and other total assholes. And these are also people I can't figure out how to talk to, much less persuade. So the question for the rest of us, those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings merely the question is how do we get there? How does a racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by having thousands of institutions whose funding and therefore very survival depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world? Can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object ringed on all sides by taboos can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood at any moment by saying one wrong word about it? Now, I think these questions answer themselves to outgrow our obsession with racial difference. We have to outgrow our obsession with race, and you don't do that by maintaining your obsession with it. Now, you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post racial society would seem, but you might disagree about the path to get there and the question of what to do next. And in fact, one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post racial future, he thinks it's just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us. And he asked me to imagine just how absurd it would be to have told Martin Luther King, Jr. At the dawn of the civil rights movement that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race. That seems like a fair point, but Coleman Hughes has actually drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seem just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I'm hoping to be here. And you can see these quotations on his Twitter feed. None of those statements by King would make sense coming out of Black Lives Matter at the moment. But in any case, as I said, I think we're living in a very different time than Martin Luther King, Jr. Was. And what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we're paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism and social justice generally and the importance of identity generally. And this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for historically disadvantaged groups isn't generally barred by white racists who won't vote for them or hire them or celebrate their achievements or buy their products. And it isn't generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair. Now, there are surely still some of that, but there must be less of it now than there ever was. The real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality with respect to wealth and education and health and social order, levels of crime in particular, and the resulting levels of incarceration and single parent families. And it seems very unlikely that these disparities, whatever their origin in the past, can be solved by focusing on the problem of lingering racism, especially where it doesn't exist. And the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point. And yet now we're inundated with messages from every well intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. I mean, black lives matter is everywhere. Of course Black Lives Matter, but the messaging of this movement around the reality of police violence is wrong and is creating a public hysteria. I just got a message from the American Association for. The advancement of science. Talking about fear of the other. Right. And the quote from the email is left unchecked racism, sexism, homophobia, and fear of the other can enter any organization or community and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future. Okay, fine. But is that really the concern in the scientific community right now? Unchecked racism, sexism and homophobia? Is that really what ails science in the year 2020? I don't think so. I'll tell you the fear of the Other that does seem warranted everywhere right now. It's the Other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It's the Other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can't join a conversation that converges on the truth because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the Other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren't something to be corrected for because they're the very foundations of his epistemology. We should fear the Other who can't distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science or worse, can make these distinctions but refuses to. And we're all capable of becoming this person, if only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature, and we have to continually correct for it. One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the COVID-19 Pandemic was first landing on our shores and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools, was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. Now, I'm pretty confident that most of the kids we're talking about here aren't white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there's no question that some of us start out on third base or second base. Everyone has a lot to deal with. Of course, life is hard, but not everyone is a single mom or a single grandparent struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. Right. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable, and we need a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions. We have to pull back from the brink here, and all we have with which to do that is conversation. The only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments, a willingness to update one's view of the world when better reasons are given, and that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive. Okay, well, perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended, but it certainly felt like I needed to say that. I hope it was useful, and the conversations will continue on this podcast. Stay safe, everyone. You./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, a few new speaking dates to announce the links are not yet live on my website, but you can mark your calendars if you live in the relevant cities. I'll be in Seattle on December 6, San Francisco on December 7, Boston on January 11, DC on January 12, and Philadelphia on January 14, Those last three are surrounding the January 13 date in New York, which is virtually sold out. I believe there are twelve seats left last time I looked, so more to come about those events. Supporters of the podcast will get a link to tickets on September 20, and then tickets will be available to the general public a week after that. So you can see my events page on my website for more details, and you can also join my email list if you want to hear about these things in the most reliable way. Okay. Today I am speaking with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. They are filmmakers who have made some of the most beloved documentaries of our time and certainly changed the way that documentary films have been made over the last few decades. And they're releasing their latest film, The Vietnam War, this weekend on PBS. It premieres on Sunday, the 17 September, and it will be available on DVD and Bluray very soon after that. This documentary is in ten parts. It's 18 hours long, and as you'll hear in this conversation, it fairly blew my mind. It really is a remarkable piece of work, which took Ken and Lynn and the rest of their team ten years to make, so you'll hear much more about it and my experience watching it over the next hour. But I really recommend that you take the time to watch this series. If you thought you knew something about the Vietnam War and what it was like to live through it, I would dare say even if you fought in that war, there's something to be learned from this documentary. So now I bring you Ken Burns and Lynn Novic. I am here with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Ken and Lynn, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Our pleasure. Well, listen, to say that I'm a fan of your work is certainly an understatement, and I think that's probably an understatement for almost anyone who encounters your work. You have made so many amazing films together, probably most famously The Civil War, which virtually everyone has seen, I imagine. But there was Prohibition, jazz, baseball, just so many great films. And these are miniseries, really. I mean, these are many hours long. And now you've released, or you're about to release the latest, which is the Vietnam War, which is 18 hours long. Is that correct? Yes. Ten episodes, 18 hours. Yeah. So I am about 15 hours into it. Don't spoil the end for me. We win this war. Right? I really don't want to do a spoiler thing for you. I've had a full immersion experience that most people watching it on PBS won't because I have the disks, and I've watched those 15 hours in the last 48. Really amazingly intense. And it strikes me that this is an utterly unique document for reasons that you couldn't fully control. I mean, first of all, there was an endless amount of footage of the actual war, which you can't say of every war. And there's also the fact that there were so many people who experienced the war who were still alive, who you could talk to. And then there's the additional fact that we are at enough remove from this particular war in time, now about 50 years, so that you can have this perspective on it and give it this amazingly even handed treatment. And finally and this is something you really had no control over there's the fact that you're releasing this now at this moment in history, and it has a resonance which I feel like it wouldn't have had you released this, let's say, in the first term of obama's administration, it strikes me as an incredibly relevant and prescient document. Right now, it's like we're looking into a time capsule. But I also felt like I was looking into a crystal ball that was 50 years old. I don't know if it strikes you that way, but it just seems like this is a gold mine. Yeah. This is the great gift of history that we always forget. And I would suggest that had we released it ten years ago, it might also have stunning and different kind of resonances. Human nature never changes. And so whatever's going on now, the past is always going to resonate with it because we can see features of it. But I think it's quite startling right now, and nothing that we intentionally timed the completion of the film to. Indeed, most of the editorial work was done on this before the caucus and primary seasons began in the election. But this is a film about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the current administration, about a White House in disarray, obsessed with leaks, about a president certain the press is lying, making up stories about him, about asymmetrical warfare that confounds the mighty might of the US. Military, about huge document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere that destabilizes the conventional wisdom and the current conversation and accusations that a political campaign reached out during the time of a national election to a foreign power to help them influence that national election. Yeah, that's pretty stunning. Yeah. But all of these were true back in 2006 when Lynn and I began working on it, as they are still true now. And all of them and dozens more are from Vietnam that resonate in the present. Strangely, some of the resonances are inconvenient or at least uncomfortable in that their polarity is reversed in a way. Yes. So for instance, there was some I forget which administration did it. I guess it was LBJ at some point. There was the allegation that Russian operatives were stoking the anti war movement, essentially. And whether or not that could have been true then, it certainly played as a completely cynical bit of paranoia, whereas now we have this increasingly well documented meddling of Russia into our system. It was a bewildering experience, frankly, to watch this film. Yes. And then you have the actual evidence that the Nixon campaign reached out to South Vietnam to get them to boycott the peace talks that had suddenly improved and were improving Humphrey's chances. And Johnson gets wind of this and calls up Everett Dirkson, the Republican leader in the Senate, and said, this is treason. And Dirkson says yes. And in our film, the next call that you hear is Nixon sort of saying, oh, you know, Mr. President, I never do this and Nixon's lying and the President knows it. And so you have an exact correlation, just as the other one seemed kind of absurd and paranoia, but now true. This one is a fact, but we're now trying to connect the dots in this moment about that. So it's pleasant. Jeans. Yeah. So let's step back from the actual content of the film for a moment and just talk about your making of it. And then I want to move through the story a little bit systematically because it really is an education that most of us haven't had on just how damaging the Vietnam War was to our society and to Vietnam. And it was a disaster on so many levels. When did you guys decide to make this film? Well, we've been thinking about the Vietnam War as one of the most important events in American history since the Second World War. And it's been sort of on the back burner for many years, sort of lurking there along with many other subjects. And when we finished our film on the Second World War, we hadn't been broadcast yet, but it was around 2006. Ken turned to me at one of the mixing sessions and said, we have to do Vietnam. And I remember saying, I agree. Which part? And he said, all of it. And I said, OK, that's great, let's do it. And yet we took a big deep gulp because we knew even then how enormously complicated and challenging this story would be to tell, and it has turned out to be the case. We really wanted to try to tell it from every possible side and to listen to people who have very strong feelings about it, sometimes conflicted feelings, and to understand Vietnamese perspectives as well as Americans. And so it took us ten years to kind of wrestle this enormously challenging story to the ground. Yeah. And the footage you have is amazing. Both the contemporaneous footage of of actual battles, which you appear to have from both sides. You have North Vietnamese footage, too, right? Yes. It's just astonishing that this even exists. And you seemingly have an endless amount of footage of our own side, which also it just strikes me as strange that it exists in so many cases. Well, we had a free press that was unfettered in their access to the war and the theater of war. In this case, unlike World War II in Korea, where the press was very much censored and controlled, and Vietnam represents that one outlying situation that permitted the press at great risk to themselves. And in fact, hundreds of journalists and and videographers and filmmakers and soundmen were killed during the course of the war to provide this seemingly bottomless amount of footage. What happens, though, is that they congregate in archives all around the world, and a traditional film production only has the resources to spend a little time in each archive if they can even get there. So what happens is that we tend to push around our plate the same footage over and over again. And it's footage that we have. But we've also had the luxury of spending a decade and having the deep dive and permitting us to go into the archives and spend more than just a cursory amount of time, but literally months and years getting to know them and finding out all the nooks and crannies of that archives. Not just footage, but also still photographs to benefit this production. So while the classic images are there, the classic famous moments, we are able to deconstruct them in, we think, a different kind of light. Whether it's the Napalm girl, Kim Fook, or it's the assassination of Lem in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive by the head of the National Police, Luan, or other famous things, we can in some ways deconstruct them. But more importantly for these quotidian moments, with fighter pilots and helicopter crew chiefs and Marines and army guys ambushed or in battle charging up hills, you have a kind of immersive experience that places you there. And one thing you should know is that 98% of the footage comes to us without any sound. And we have to therefore then research ourselves what an M 16 sounds like, as opposed to an AK 47, as opposed to a traditional tripod mounted machine gun, as opposed to other kinds of armaments. And what the sounds of the engines of an a three as opposed to an a four sound like and what they actually look like to get it strayed. And so much of the years involved in this is the attempt at fairisimilitude and in many cases, those battles that you referred to have new footage, perhaps never before seen footage, but also a sound effects track that may number into 150 or 160 individual sounds to create the moment of battle. I didn't know that, but in retrospect, it seems like the sound design was amazing. I felt like I had not actually seen war footage like this before. Well, we were our own sound editors we've worked with for years and years, and they are a remarkable group of people. What was the most telling test was when we would have playbacks of the completed episodes and invite periodically the head of the archive, say, at CBS or ABC or NBC principal source of material, as you can imagine. And watching them watch, stunned at how their footage had been used, intermixed with their competitors footage and then finally brought to life with this complex sound effects. And they found themselves as distracted and immersed into the story when their job was to sort of evaluate the uses of it. And we felt thrilled. And they were extraordinarily helpful at every juncture in making sure we could find and get every lost bit of footage, every obscure bit of footage. And that extended to still photographs and audio tapes from the presidential library, the presidential tapes that are so extraordinarily unbelievable and damning. Yeah, just to have that as a resource, those LBJ tapes are unbelievable because what you have, both in the case of LBJ and Nixon, I guess, Kennedy, too, you have the ultimate mind reading machine. And what is perfectly obvious from the earliest stages of this war is how hopeless it appeared, even from their perspective. And yet we meander further and further into this quagmire for years and years. And there's a point in the series where you think, surely the war is about over, given what we're hearing, and yet it's just beginning. I want to ask you a little more about your process before we dive into it, but perhaps you can address this question. How is it, given what they were clearly thinking, that this war was possible, that it unfolded the way it did? Well, we don't have historians appearing on screen interpreting what is the story being told. So we really try to just put the pieces together and using this remarkable real time audio of conversations in the White House as you hear LBJ and Nixon and Kennedy talking about what they're doing and their decision making process and the information they have available to them. And then you have to, as a viewer, sort of try to think yourself about, well, why are they continuing to prosecute a war when they don't think they have a very good chance of success? And one of the things that comes up again and again is that they're worried about getting reelected. They're worried about their popularity. They're worried about whether the American public would want to be told that we're not going to win the war. That's a pervasive theme, a drumbeat from very early on. And we live in a democracy. That's a real question for people who assume, you know, the greatest levels of power. They're always worrying about getting reelected. And the Vietnam War is a huge byproduct of that. Yeah, it was a concern over the loss of face, which it is a kind of psychosis when you actually understand what's happening on the ground and you're just sending waves upon waves of people to die for something that on every level. The descriptions of these battles where the whole goal is to take a hill, but there's no point in actually taking the hill. And once they take it at the cost of hundreds of lives, they occupy it for like an hour and then walk on down the other side because there was no point in getting the hill in the first place. The picture of futility that develops here over the course of the series, you basically live out the political implications of it hour after hour as you see the resistance to this war building. Again, before we jump into the content, I want to just ask you a little more about your process. How do you collaborate on a film like this? Are you together most of the time? Are you in different states? I live and work in New Hampshire, and Lynn lives and works in New York. So the New York office became the kind of production center during the production. The film was edited in New Hampshire. And so there's, thanks to the way we're talking now, all sorts of ways in which we collaborate instantaneously on this. And we have an extraordinary group of colleagues. Jeffrey Ward, the writer I've worked with for 35 years, editors I've worked with for even that amount of time as well, 30 plus years coproducers that have assisted us, people who are researching pictures. It's an extraordinarily close knit family divided between New Hampshire and New York and lots of communications. And it's a wonderful process, and you're right to focus on that because process is everything that we're about. We're not about setting a prescribed research period and then followed by a writing period out of which is produced some document that is now written in stone that informs the shooting and the editing, but in fact an open ended process that never stops researching, that never stops writing, that is constantly willing to shoot or reshoot or add a new interview and is always looking for new material, whether it's footage or still photographs. And I think more to the point, it's easy to say never stop researching. But that means constantly of being where particularly on a subject as controversial and as constantly shifting as the scholarship about Vietnam, aware of the most recent scholarship. So we find a lot of our work just changing a number from four to three when we find out that that was how many regiments of North Vietnamese soldiers went down the Pokemon trail that month to try to get it right? The last year and a half. As we were sound editing and onlineing and mixing, we were also removing adjectives and adverbs that we thought maybe, perhaps might have suggested a particular bent. We had no agenda. We had no axe to grind. This was not a polemical piece. We wanted to be umpires, calling balls and strikes. And it was hugely important that our process serve that. And it has for a long time. And I think this production, more than anything else, bears at the fruits of that kind of diligent adherence to process. Insofar as this was the most challenging of any production we've ever engaged in, and very satisfying because we were able, even in the darkest moments, to trust to our process and to yield to it and understand that eventually structures and arcs and storylines would emerge that things that we seemed overly identified with would be lost. That new things we would have to incorporate, that the little darlings would all have to be eliminated, but new ways of understanding it. Filmmakers particularly, my experience, is when you have a scene that's working, the last thing you want to do is change it if it's working. But inevitably, in every scene you found out new information that complicated each minute dynamic within every scene. And instead of sort of pushing back and perhaps settling, we sort of reveled in and moved towards that complication and tried to every time engage what was difficult about this and proved our point that we felt all alone. That particularly in war, but also in many other things, more than one truth can obtain at the same time and still be a truth. There's not a moral relativism to that. There is just depending on your perspectives. And as Lynn said, we had decided at the beginning to engage all sorts of perspectives. Not just American perspectives, but North Vietnamese, the winners, and South Vietnamese the losers who lost not only a war, but their country, which disappeared off the face of the earth after barely 20 years in existence. And so every day was a constant reminder that that open endedness. The willingness to be corrigible, the willingness to suddenly realize you might have to double back on yourself, the necessity to, at the very beginning, jettison preconceptions and baggage in favor of a Vietnam War that betrays even those like me who live through it, betrays our original conventional wisdom about it. It was exhilarating and humiliating and about as stimulating as you could possibly imagine. I just wanted to chime in one thing about the way that we collaborate because as Ken was speaking out, it's hard to explain, but we're documentarians, right? So we're not making up a story. We're actually trying to organize this enormous amount of material that Ken described into a coherent narrative that works sort of chapter by chapter, scene by scene, episode by episode, into some kind of coherent whole over 18 hours. And what happens is it's a process of distillation and it's enormously creative and it is enormously collaborative. And, you know, it really comes down to sort of intuitively suggesting ideas about what might or might not work in the film and then trying them out and listening to each other and then trying to make the film better. And that is what we do day after day after day in a very open way that I think is unusual in how most people go about their jobs. We just get up every day, go to work here to hear what each other has to say and how to make our film better. And it could be little tiny decisions or huge decisions about what's in an episode or what's in the scene or which character we're going to amplify and what we're going to cut and what word we're going to choose. And where we're going to put the comma and which picture we're going to look at and what music we're going to hear and where the sound effect is going to go. There's a million decisions, and it is, as Ken set, a process. And one of the most. It's almost euphoric when we're all working together toward this thing that ends up being bigger than any of us. And I just feel very lucky that we get to do it together. I'm glad you mentioned the music, because talk about an embarrassment of riches. And it's actually a point that's made in the film about the protest movement that somebody at some point says that the protest movement itself was immensely empowered by just how good the music of the time was, which is something I had never really thought of. But that point is brought home in just how you score this thing because it's just one fantastic song after another. I want to go back to something you said, Ken, about moral relativism, because what you get here is not a picture of moral relativism, but the status of the war, in so many respects is so ambiguous morally that it almost demanded the kind of even handedness you described, whereas you went there as though from Mars without any agenda, and you just let each side tell its story. And it's an amazing experience to witness a war from both sides in this way, where there aren't obvious bad guys, there are some obvious bad guys, and perhaps we can talk about that. But the picture of the pointless wastage of human life and the gains, such as they are, of civilization is brought home by this because you can understand both sides. And yet the whole thing seems so profoundly unnecessary. It is remarkable and it's not a story you could have told, say, of our fight against the the Nazis. No. And and we did do a film with an eye on the history of World War II and violently challenging phenomenon. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, I have Paul Bloom back. Paul, good to hear you. Good to be back. I leave a couple of messes to clean up, or at least one mess to clean up from the last round, where we I haven't gone back to listen to exactly what we said, but I got the sense that we disparaged Peewee Herman somehow, or at least minimized. That was the least of my intention. Nothing means spirited, but we had we diminished his stature or assumed that he was invisible or had disappeared into obscurity in some way because we haven't been paying attention to his career. But someone pointed out, and I quickly confirmed, that the man is selling out very large auditoriums with his latest act. I mean, he has quite a career. He's out there making a fair amount of noise. So it seems we were wrong about Paul Rubens. Well, good to know. Good to know. As as I was walking through the studio ten minutes ago, I saw that Al Franken is coming to to New Haven. So, you know, I think he had somewhat of a blow to his reputation, but maybe redemption is more common than we had expected. Maybe cancellation is rarely permanent. That's good to know. Anyway, so no hard feelings, paul Rubin's? Absolutely no hard feelings towards Paul Rubins. And the other thing so the other thing that I just had in my mind to mention, based on the last conversation, we started by talking about Kobe's death and the death of everyone else involved in that helicopter crash, because we recorded our last conversation the day after that happened. And I didn't know this at the time, but finding out about it, it's an interesting ethical question. So we didn't touch on this. I believe it is in fact true that TMZ, the kind of paparazzi inspired website, announced Kobe's death before the family even knew about it. That was the way the information came out. And I'm wondering just what you think about the ethics of that. The interesting thing, from my point of view is, given that I've taken such a strong position against the advertising model and what that has done to digital media, this seems to me to be another symptom of it. I mean, the race to publish is really directly incentivized by the kind of win or take all effects of clickbait journalism and with different incentives that there wouldn't be the same kind of sense of time pressure to publish. I was just wondering what you thought about that, because many people think, well, why does it matter? The tragedy is you've lost your husband, your father. This is a 20 megaton catastrophe, however you look at it. Does it really matter that you heard about it on Twitter? Because TMZ tweeted it and not through some sober channel. But it seems to me to matter a lot. I'm wondering what you as a psychologist yeah, I agree with you. I don't have any special expertise on this as a psychologist, just sort of common sense and decency. If somebody's father, daughter, wife, whatever dies, you want to be told in a sober, controlled circumstance. You don't want to find it as a hashtag. Yeah. And I think for the most part, news sources are often particularly well behaved in this way, but some of them aren't. And there is a sort of Darwinian battle for clicks and for attention, and so some don't play by the rules. And I think in some way there's a question of what should be legally allowed, which I actually think a lot, but there's also a question of what's sort of morally atrocious and something could be you wouldn't want the law to punish them, but you want to also say that's kind of despicable. Yeah. No, it really is hard to imagine the editorial call here when you have every reason to believe that this information is minutes old and that the family probably doesn't know anything about it and you're racing to publish it's. Just something has gotten away from you there and again. It's the incentives at your back, no doubt. But it's a symptom of our digital ecosystem at the moment. And definitely at the moment. I mean, we're both old enough to remember when there were newspapers and rushing to get it out. We rushing to get it out the next day. Yeah. And for the last long while, it's been a matter of minutes or seconds. Right. So that kind of changes everything. Okay, so now we're talking in the immediate aftermath of the Trump impeachment acquittal and the high drama of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union address and Mitt Romney breaking from the herd and voting to impeach. What do you think about all of this? Do you have a hot take on on the politics of this? I have the observations everyone else has, which is, if anything, Trump is becoming more and more unhinged, more and more confident in his abilities to do whatever he pleases. And so I think things are going to get worse and worse and worse until, I hope with the next election, they get better. And it is true that the Democrats are responding in kind, and people have said, oh, this doesn't work. Trump makes fun of your appearance. You make fun of Trump's appearance. You're just descending to his level. But the thing is, the history of battling Trump is nothing works. The high road doesn't work. The low road doesn't work. That's what is so strange about him in this moment, politically, because nothing works. And I'm trying to understand why this is the case. I mean, it almost seems like a a supernatural phenomenon, right, because I can't map it on to any normal experience. It's it's like the the Obelisk in 2001, right? I mean, it's an it's it's the superficial version of that that was like an infinite profundity somehow, that never had to be explained. This is just the singularity that at the heart of the cosmos. And Trump is like the inverse of all of that. So it's like there's no depth. It's all surface, and yet the surface is engineered in a way so as to reflect the worst in everyone. This is what's so bizarre about Trump and the response to him. He has a capacity to tarnish the reputation of everyone who comes into his orbit, right? And this is, again, whether it's a supporter or a critic, and I mean, for supporters, this is very obvious. I mean, the effect is astonishing. You have serious people with real reputations. I mean, politicians and soldiers and business people who have lifetimes of real accomplishment, who achieve levels of personal hypocrisy and political cowardice in propping him up and in covering for his lies and in pretending not to notice his lies, in just pretending that he's normal that we've never seen before. But then the flip side of it is that all of his critics are also diminished by how they respond to this. And the case with Pelosi, I think, is an example of this. Many people are obviously celebrating what she did, but I think it does also diminish her, right? She is left behaving in a way that a Congress person shouldn't behave, right? And she's demeaning the office of the presidency because of its current occupant. And there's just something so strange about this, this term of disparagement that Trump supporters used. Trump derangement syndrome. Everyone has TDs. There's something to that, because he is a kind of super stimulus, right? The reaction to him is exaggerated because it's out of proportion to his qualities as a person. It's out of proportion to the bad things he's done and the bad things he aspires to do. Because he's not actually evil. Right. He's not as scary as he might be, and yet somehow he gets an even bigger reaction than someone would if they were just truly scary. Right? So it's almost like his smallness as a person is invoking a bigger reaction than you would ordinarily feel. And I feel it myself. I feel it personally. I've said this. I find him more despicable than I found Osama bin Laden. Right? And that's strange. This is psychologically true, because with Osama bin Laden, it's just obvious to me that he could have been a mensch in some sense, right. He's making serious sacrifices for ideas that he deeply believes in. He's committed to a cause greater than himself. I don't doubt that he had real ethical connections to the people in his life that he cared about. He was a real person, right. And in some ways, he's a kind of a moral hero in a very bad game. And so therefore, he's kind of prototypically evil when viewed from my game, but he's a person of actual substance. He's just committed to the wrong ends, whereas Trump is the negation of all of those things, and yet he's President of the United States, and the perversity of that juxtaposition is just fucking crazy making, and that's how you get this outsized reaction, or at least that's my interpretation of it. So there's some people I agree with all of that, but there are some people who have made contact with Trump and haven't been degraded. It's a very small list, I think. Who's on that list? Well, there's quite a bit of conservative writers who, when Trump came into power, they sort of said, this guy clashes with all of our principles. The NeverTrumpers. Like Jonah Goldberg, for instance. David from. Yeah. And they said, even though this is going to get me kicked off Fox News, I'm going to lose some revenue, I'm going to lose some fans, I'm going to sort of stand up for what I believe, and they paid a sort of financial and sort of professional price for it. And now we have Mitt Romney. And my feelings about Mitt Romney have always been complicated. I don't think he's a he's quite the sort of choir boy as people like to think of him as. When he was running for president, he was he was pretty rough and tumble, but I have nothing but admiration for him standing up against Trump at this time. So what do you think? Do you think would you put Romney as an exception? Yeah. Well, first, I should apologize for all the bad things I've said about Romney in the past, because I went fairly hard against Romney and his Mormonism when he was when he was a candidate in 2012. And I'm sure at least once or twice mentioned that he must be wearing magic underpants and that we did not need a president who believed what he believed. And yeah, my concerns about his religious beliefs and kind of the inflexibility of mind that you would imagine he would have given those beliefs, I view those as valid concerns in any president. And it's painfully ironic to me that in all of my hopes that Trump would be impeached, the person waiting to assume the presidency is a religious dogmatist of the first order, mike Pence, who in another context would trip all of the switches in me that would worry about theocracy in in the US. So I went after Romney for his religiosity in the past, and I've noticed the same things about him that everyone has noticed, that he's clearly a political opportunist in many ways, and there was something truly humiliating about his seeking to be secretary of state under Trump after all that had gone down between him and Trump. I mean, that was almost a Shakespearean level of cravenness at the time or attachment to political power. Still, if you want the full Shakespeare, go for Ted Cruz. Oh, you had Ted Cruz. Yes. Brutal, personal, deep humiliation by Trump, and then he has to go back and beg him for various things and champion him difficult politics. Well, also, we're still it was finally commemorated in the shot of him working the phone banks for Trump. I don't know if you saw that photograph. I have seen that. So it's just awful, right? I mean, just where does one go to get a spine in the game of but now, he did redeem himself to some extent. Yeah, that was all by way of my saying that in this moment, though, it's hard to imagine that it's a political price that matters. It's very real for him. He's someone now who's being vilified by his colleagues and his political tribe and probably worse. I mean, he probably has the maniacs in Trump's base sending him death threats, and some of which are credible. And it's just the people who go against Trump have stories to tell about what that's like when the mob turns on you. So, yeah, I just have nothing but respect for how he's comforting himself in this moment and certainly don't underestimate that it's, in his world, a real sacrifice. So let me switch gears for us and say something nice about Trump. It's sincerely nice. How surprising. Yes. And it's something from Tyler Cowan. So Cowan is one of my favorite writers and thinkers, and he has a little piece, I think, in Bloomberg News or something, where he talks about the best orators of the last decade. And he lists two of them discussed. He thinks Barack Obama's a third, maybe a distant third. One is Greta Thunberg, who is an extremely unusual, very powerful speaker. This unusual prosody and great moral seriousness that sort of juxtaposition between her being seemingly sort of a young woman and talking with such seriousness and gravity. But thunberg second. Trump is first. Yeah, Trump is an extraordinary orator, well, extraordinary in scare quotes. But obviously, I don't mean this is sort of like, oh, I don't mean this as a moral good. I mean in terms of skill. No, what can be ascribed to skill? I still stand by my evil Chauncey Gardner interpretation here. I think there's far less method to his madness than actual madness that just happens to work in this context for whatever reason. But and I certainly share your respect for Tyler Cowen, but I don't agree here. I think there's no advantage to him, or at least I don't see the advantage in him being incoherent. For him to contradict himself over the course of five minutes is not fourth level chess. It's just a mistake. Right. And and it just the fact that he pays no price for that mistake, whereas you and I would pay a very high price in the context of a conversation like this. He's managed to select an audience that doesn't care about contradictions. They're not going to hold him to the letter of any utterance because they don't. Why they don't, it's still a mystery to me. I don't think I have an adequate theory of mind for the people, and there are tens of millions of them who do not care when he says A in direct contradiction to B, or vice versa over the course of two minutes. And it may be on a topic that they profess to care about, and yet they don't care that you can't actually follow both of those paths through his mind or any apparent reality. A while ago, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt used the term bullshit as a technical term, and he says there's people tell the truth, then there's people who lie, but then there's bullshitters who are simply indifferent to the truth. And that was coined before Trump ascended, but it works well for him. I think you're holding Trump to sort of a standard that his audience doesn't. He's seen as an entertainer, as a showman. Just to give a sense of what I'm talking about, cowen points out his speech is highly repetitive, slow and ponderous. I have a soft spot for slow and ponderous because I am that, but highly repetitive. So when I watch him being highly repetitive, I see neurological injury manifest, right? I see someone who is in a visibly audibly, in a holding pattern because they can't get to the next thought. And worse. What I see with him and I've commented on this before I see with him to a unique degree. I I've mean, never seen it this bad in any other person. I see him being prompted by and anchored to accidents in his utterances that he then is committed to shoring up. And the way I tried to illustrate this in the past and I can't think of another way, but it's almost like he's speaking in verse, but this is extemporaneous. And he doesn't know how he's going to complete the rhyme, but he's held to it. So he'll just say something like, there was once a man from Spokane, right? And he doesn't know where he's going after this, right? But. He's got Spokane. He landed on Spokane, and then he has to get to something that rhymes there from immigrants. We get too much cocaine. Yeah. And he'll land on that. And that is the message. Right? And it's born of a process back to Frankfurt here. He's just bullshitting to remind people of this brilliant distinction that Frankfurt made between a bullshitter and a liar. A liar is someone who is fully aware of the logical expectations of his audience. He's fully aware of what reality is and the departures he's introducing from it in his speech. And he's having to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces in where they fit in real time. So he knows that you're expecting coherence he knows what you know about the world and he's engineering his lives so as to go undetected. A bullshitter is just talking. He's not wasting any of the cognitive overhead to track what reality is or what your expectations are of his fit to it. And he's just creating a mood with the way he speaks and floviating and confabulating. And that's what Trump is doing to a degree that is truly unsurpassed. And in any other walk of life, he would immediately be recognized as a con man and a fraud and a bullshitter and someone who can't be trusted and certainly someone who can't be given significant responsibility. And yet it works in this country at this time in the presidency. So, yes, it's true that he's incredibly effective for the people he's apparently effective for, but I do not understand it. I think there's some sort of genius behind it. I don't think he himself is a genius, but I think everything you're saying there is the feeling that he has no idea what he's going to say next. He could drift everywhere he could find himself, get some laughter from the crowd and seize on that. And it's so different from the standard polished presentations one gets from typical politician. I mean, to some extent, I've listened to Jordan Peterson and Jordan Peterson is a thousand times more articulate. Yeah. And and smoother and clearer. You get somewhat of a hilarious feeling. It's hilarious you said that. Because I've actually said the same point about talking in verse and completing the rhyme. I've said about Jordan too, in my moments of the greatest opposition with him, that there is a quality where he's not doing the reality testing that I would want him to do. It just sounds good what he's saying, but if you actually bring him up short and say, okay, what do you actually mean by God or faith or whatever it is in this sentence, then it goes into the ditch. So there is that just kind of being carried away by the sound of your own voice. But with Trump it is so bereft of content. Right? It's at the level of a fourth grader and it's and it's repetitive at the level of a fourth grader. I mean, no fourth grader repeats himself as much as Trump does. You can hear the Trump derangement syndrome. And this is back to my point. It's like I stand by everything that I'm saying about Trump now, but the fact that I'm saying it and the fact that it's taking up this much of our conversation is even for the people who will agree with me. Certainly many of them think this guy is living rent free in your brain and this is bad for you and it's bad for us, and it's bad for conversation and it's and there's there's something true about that. And I think we have to you know, I don't know how we respond to that fact politically over the next nine months, but there is something. I really have had to pick my moments with Trump and just ignore him for many podcasts running because it's boring to criticize him ultimately. But I'll add one thing to my blast of Trump low. Then we can leave it alone. Yes. Which is other presidents have phrases that they're known for the soft bigotry of low expectations or a lot of Kennedy's lines, and they were typically written by professionals. But somehow I think these phrases we're going to remember like fake news, drain the swamp. Make America great again, make Mexico pay for it. The things which people know by heart. And he could start him and the audience will finish them. These seem to be coming from Trump's mind, and there's so little to respect about him. But he has some abilities, some really extraordinary abilities. Well, he has a one ability. Again, this is whether you call this an ability or a symptom, that's debatable. But he is utterly shameless. Right. He's scandal proof within his own mind. He just cannot be derailed by being shown to be at odds with himself or with reality. And that, again, is one of these crazy making things that he can lie 16,000 times and never pay a penalty for it. Well, you're talking substance, and I agree with that. But I'm thinking about style and think about analogy. I was listening to a podcast by Jordan Peterson, which I don't do, but I just wanted to listen to what he sounds like, what his book talk is. And there's something about it where you don't want to shut it off. You have no idea where it's going. And Peterson does something which Trump doesn't, which he displays genuine curiosity and interest and energy, a range of emotions you don't normally hear in this kind of talk. And there's something about it. He's a very good speaker, but there's a kind of free associative, meandering, somewhat confabulatory thing going on in that there's not a rigorously, honest reality testing. And again, I like Jordan a lot, so this is something I've said to his face and on stage. And so this is not me saying anything behind his back that I haven't actually said to him both in private and in public. And it's just on some level, it's a different he has an account for why this is a feature, not a bug. He thinks that my slavish attachment to reality testing and logic is something that is a symptom of my own rigidity and lack of awareness of certain truths that can be bivalued or however just making up words and putting them in his mouth. But he's more comfortable with paradox and a mythopoetic take on reality than I am, certainly, but none of that. It would be amazing to know that behind closed doors, trump is very different. Everything I've said about Trump and this is amazing this has gone on much longer than I anticipated, but more Trump Derangement syndrome. Yeah, no, let me comp to it. But I would add that I think it's warranted everything I've said about Trump and my, you know, evil chauncey. Gardner thesis is readily disconfirmable. I mean, it could be disconfirmable in a matter of 15 seconds. I mean, he would just have to say something that I would imagine he's incapable of saying if he just for a paragraph, was tenfold more articulate than I've ever seen him be and said, this is the way I talk with my friends behind closed doors, but this is the way I talk on stage. And then show me both versions, I would realize he actually is a genius who has calculated his effect on his audience. Then I'd be prepared to believe anything. He could be reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius behind closed doors and talking for hours about them. Insightfully. But I know exactly what he's doing behind closed doors, or at least I think I do. Right. He's just watching Fox and Friends and shrieking at people, and the reports of what he's like behind closed doors certainly substantiate that. Anyway. Okay, we're going to pivot to something here which is really adjacent to this topic and related to actually, it was synchronous that you mentioned, Harry Frankfurt, because he has also written about inequality and wealth. Inequality is something that has been very much on my mind, and it is really a pressing issue in our politics now, and arguably the most pressing issue on the Democratic side. I don't know what you think of the prospects of our nominating, someone like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in the general election, but a concern about wealth inequality would be the reason why that would happen. Yeah. Putting aside the specifics of who's going to be next president, I think people think in a very confused way about inequality. I think for the most part, people think they are very concerned about wealth inequality, but they aren't, really. And this guy, she comes from Frankfurt who wrote a book on a topic, so Frankfurt says this isn't exactly his example. This is the idea. Jeff Bezos. Compare Jeff Bezos to your average person is $10 million. They have a hugely unequal amount of wealth, way more than your average, extremely poor person and rich person. They have an extraordinarily by many magnitudes different than wealth, but nobody worries about that. Nobody says, oh, my God, such inequality. Right. Except for the person with $10 million. Yes. This person deals with staying of proximity to basis. Yes, this is true. But in general, it's not the biggest problem in the world. So I think, and this is Frankfurt's argument, and I've developed this in both technical papers and sort of casual papers, when people say they're worried about inequality, they're typically worried about one of two other things and a few other possibilities. One is poverty. Poverty is terrible, and we tend to worry about poverty justifiably so we want to. A world in which everybody was well off, can afford food and health care and recreation would be a wonderful world. And if we were in that world, and some people made ten times as much or 100 times as much, I think we would worry a lot less. So there's poverty and then the second factor is unfairness. So there's a lot of laboratory experiments finding that even young kids get very upset at unequal divisions. But these are always cases where the unequal divisions are arbitrary. If you switch it a bit so that, say, one person works harder than another and then makes more money, the kids are happy with the unequal divisions and they get annoyed when the divisions are equal. And the same thing for for adults, for regardless of the society, people actually want unequal societies. If you offer them total equality, it'll reject it. They want unequal societies so long as the inequality is calibrated to natural gifts or effort or some sort of thing that doesn't seem unfair. Not many people are that upset that JK Rowling is so long. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris well, very brief housekeeping here. Just reminding you once again that if you're supporting the podcast, please subscribe to the Subscriber Only feed. You do this by with your mobile device, going to my website, going to the subscriber content page and grabbing the RSS with one click on the icon of the podcasting app that you're using. If you're not using a supported app, then you can manually copy the RSS information and that will ensure that you get all the content that I produce going forward. Okay, well, I'm recording this on October 27, probably releasing this on the 28th. But this is the one year anniversary of the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, where eleven people were murdered. I believe six were injured. And this was the worst attack on the Jewish community in American history, I believe. And the timing of this episode is fortuitous because I am speaking with Barry Weiss about her new book, how to Fight Antisemitism. And Barry is a staff writer and editor for the opinion section of the New York Times. She was also an Op ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal. Before that, she has worked at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish politics and culture. And she is a native of Pittsburgh and in fact was a bot mitzvah at the Tree of Life synagogue and knew people who were killed, as you'll hear. So this is a timely conversation, and Barry and I cover a fair amount of ground here. We talk about the different strands of antisemitism right wing, left wing, and Islamic. We talk about the difference between antisemitism and other forms of racism, which was a point that only became clear to me in reading Barry's book. We talk about the so called great replacement theory among white supremacists, the populist response to globalization, the history of antisemitism in the US. Its theological roots, criticisms of Israel, the fate of the Jews in Western Europe, and other topics. I'll have a few more things to say about all this in my afterward, but now, without further delay, I bring you Barry Weiss. I am here with Barry Weiss. Barry, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. So you have written a book that's not going to be controversial at all. This has to be fun for you. I know this is already out and launched and reviewed, and you're well into your book tour, or maybe somewhere near the end of it, or maybe the book tour is going to subsume the rest of your life, but it feels like that at the moment. Yeah, the book is how to Fight Antisemitism, and it is a great and bracing read. It's a short book. This is one of these books that you really can start and finish with confidence, which is nice. We want to talk about this in great depth. The topic of antisemitism. But before we do, I just want to get some context for you and your work as a journalist and as an opinion person. How would you describe your politics and your career thus far as a journalist? Well, if you Google me, you'll get one answer, which is that I'm apparently extremely controversial. My answer is that I'm fairly boring. I am very socially liberal. I'm sort of hawkish on foreign policy. I consider myself left of center. But I think, like many people who are similarly positioned, we're a bit politically homeless at the moment, so we sort of don't fit into either of the increasingly extreme tribes and therefore are sort of seized upon and pillaried by both of them. Just for some background, I spent six or seven years at The Wall Street Journal in two stints, first as an oped editor on the editorial page and then as a book review editor, both of which were under the umbrella of the editorial page, which is, of course, famously, I would say, free market, conservative place. And I was always the most left wing person in that milieu. Then I moved after Trump became a candidate, and I didn't want to be a part of an editorial page that was in some way apologizing for or kind of quietly supporting him or covering for him. I left along with many people, including Brett Stevens, who's now my colleague at The New York Times, and I went from being sort of the most left wing person at the Journal's editorial page to one of the most, I guess, right wing people at The New York Times. So that sort of, I think, concisely sums it up a little bit. Yeah. So needless to say, you are often maligned as a Nazi or Nazi adjacent. And I know the feeling, and perhaps we'll get into that. But let's talk about the genesis of the book, because I believe you began writing this book after the synagogue atrocity in Pittsburgh, which landed all too close to home, perhaps summarize what happened there for those who have forgotten. Right. There have been so many since then. On the morning of October 27, 2018, a white supremacist walked into Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, which is the neighborhood of Pittsburgh where I was raised. Tree of Life was the synagogue where I became a bob mitzvah. And he walked in, he shouted that all Jews must die, and then he murdered eleven people there on Shabbat Saturday morning. I was in Arizona at the time. I got a text from my youngest sister on our family chat, and she simply said, there's a shooter at Tree of Life. I immediately thought of my dad, who often goes to synagogue at one of the different services that meets there on Saturday morning. There are three communities that meet in that building. And I immediately typed back is dad. I didn't even finish the question. Thank God he wasn't there. He was still at home with my mom. But my mom wrote back, we're going to know a lot of people there. And my dad knew six or seven of the people that were killed. I knew too. I was supposed to fly to Israel, of all places, the following day to do a reporting trip on a very famous archaeological dig in Jerusalem called the City of David. I put off the trip. I went home for the week and I just sort of immersed myself in what happens to a community and a community you know so well in the aftermath of something like this and wrote several columns. I was on Bill Maher that Friday night, and I actually was under contract to write a different book, one that I'm still on the hook for sort of about our culture wars, but found myself just drawn back again and again to this topic and just sort of seeing it everywhere I looked. And so I sort of went hat in hand to my publisher and asked if I could do this quickly first and if we could get it out before the Jewish High Holidays, which somehow we managed to do. Well, you do a few very useful things in the book, and one of which is to differentiate the three poles of antisemitism the right wing, the left wing and the Islamic. I think we'll find as we speak about these things, that the latter two interact in ways that are so cynical and and sinister on the Islamic side and so Fantasmagorically stupid and masochistic on the left wing side that I mean, honestly, it's it's very hard to understand how that alliance is even possible. But when we talk about this, I think the left wing and the Islamist problem will become sort of braided. You also make a point which I hadn't really seen made before, which is that one of the reasons why the Jews are so often attacked from the left and the right and elsewhere is that on the right they are considered non white or insufficiently white, and yet able to pass for white in this kind of sinister way. And on the left, if anything, they are extra white. They somehow have extra privilege. And the least points in the intersectionality Olympics. Perhaps we should start with the right wing side because that's sort of the cleanest to talk about. And this obviously is most relevant to what happened in Pittsburgh. Did I describe the way you differentiate these things accurately? Yeah, I had written a column there was a survey or a study that came out that was very shocking last year about the prevalence of antisemitism in Europe from I believe CNN did it. And I wrote a column laying out what I described at the time as sort of a three headed dragon. I used that same structure in the book. But frankly, if I'm honest, I had hoped to avoid the chapter on Islam for all of the reasons that I think we'll get into, but are probably already obvious to anyone who listens to your show and sees the way that your ideas get talked about, that it's a very scary topic to write about. And I had honestly hoped to avoid it and then realized that it would be the most intellectually dishonest thing to write a book about antisemitism and not talk about it. Yeah. Okay, well, let's start with the cleanest case, which is the extreme right. And you make a point in the book that I really had never considered, and it explains a lot, which is that antisemitism really is not just another flavor of racism on the right. I won't put the words in your mouth, but how is the white supremacist hatred of Jews different from their hatred of other groups? There's an antiracist activist called Eric Ward who runs the Western States Center, and his essay, which is called Skin in the Game I really recommend it to people, was illuminating to me and helped inform my thinking on this. So what he says is that when I heard and maybe you're similar, when I saw the marchers in Charlottesville shouting, Jews will not replace us, I heard that originally in a very straightforward way. I heard it as, the Jew is not going to take my place in the corner office. A Jew is not going to take my status in society. Something along those lines. But I realized in reading Eric Ward's work and others that that's not what they were saying at all. What they were suggesting is that Jews, in a way and this is Eric Ward's language, they're, in a way, the greatest trick the devil has ever played. And the reason for that is because, at least in America, this is not true in Israel, where the majority of Jews are of Mizrahi descent, so they're of North African and Middle Eastern descent. In America, the majority of Jews are of Eastern European or Ashkenazi descent. 15% of American Jews are Jews of color, by the most liberal estimate. So we appear to be white, and we can pass as white. And so we trick real white people into thinking that we're like them, but in fact, we're loyal to black people and brown people and immigrants and Muslims. And if you go and you could see them as deranged, or you could see it as a kind of conspiracy theory when you read the social media postings of the killer in Pittsburgh. Right. The reason that he chose Tree of Life as the synagogue is that the previous weekend, the previous Shabbat Tree of Life, had participated in what was called national refugee Shabbat, in which dozens of synagogues around the country came together to say, we are safe spaces. I hate that language, but we are places that are open to the stranger. And the reason that we are is that one of the core Jewish values is the idea that we should never oppress a stranger because we know what it was to be strangers in the land of Egypt. And that whole initiative was put together by a very, very admirable righteous organization called Highest, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, founded in the 1880s to help settle Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms and now helps Jewish refugees, but all kinds of refugees and immigrants around the world. And he said in his social media postings and there's lots of expletives, but something along the lines of, screw your optics, I'm going in. These people are bringing in they're selling the country by helping bringing in the, quote, dirty Muslims. So that is the logic behind it. So Jews are kind of the linchpin, in a way of white supremacist thinking, because we're the kind of shadow force being the handmaidens of the people that white supremacists see as sullying white Christian America, if that makes sense. Well, unfortunately, there's very often a kernel of truth embedded in these conspiracy theories. And the kernel of truth here is that, of course, Jews have historically had a very positive attitude towards civil rights and been very supportive of civil rights in the US. And through hard experience learned the consequences of being the victims of jingoistic immigration restrictions. I mean, the most probably shocking case is what happened in 139 with the SS St. Louis. This was a ship that was carrying over 900 Jews who were seeking to escape the Holocaust, and it was denied entry in the US. It was also denied entry in Cuba and Canada and wound up having to return to Europe, where many of these Jews ended up in Auschwitz. Experiences like that, that would explain, apart from just basic human decency around the general problem of refugees, that would explain a positive orientation toward immigration that if you're a white supremacist, you would revile. So we could sort of run to the same thing here on the right with the association between Jews and socialism and communism. There have been very prominent Jews who were supportive of those political movements. And it's kind of a perfect storm of populism and isolationism and conspiracy thinking that's been fed for more than a century with notions of born of fake literature like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And it culminates now and what you refer to as the great replacement theory, which perhaps you want to summarize. The right is organized around a kind of an anti globalist inward turn into nationalism and jingoism and isolationism, and Jews are on the wrong side of that divide, right? And that's a problem like that set up leaving out the Internet and all kinds of other new phenomenon. But that is familiar to us, which is one of the reasons that I think right wing antisemitism is easier to grasp, because we only need to look at our grandparents generation in Europe and what they experienced to understand it. I think it's in our bones, in a way. And I would also just say, speaking of the St. Louis, I don't usually recommend anything on Twitter, but there's this really beautiful moving Twitter account called St. Louis Manifest that actually just tweets out the BIOS of of everyone that was on that ship that I follow that's just really moving, and there's photographs and people want to know more about it. So remind me, what what is the great replacement theory? The great replacement theory is there's a great essay that Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote about it, but it's really this basic idea that summarized by Steve King, which is you can't replace our civilization, as he put it, with someone else's babies. This, to me, is a deeply antiAmerican idea because the ideal of this country is the idea that our civilization is open to anyone who wants to adhere to the ideas of it. It has nothing to do with bloodline. It has everything to do with fealty to a certain set of beliefs. And this whole notion of sort of like blood and soil nationalism that you increasingly see on the right. And that is at the heart of great replacement theory, which is that civilization or culture is somehow something that is passed down in the blood and not something that's passed down through culture and ideas and beliefs is just, to me, deeply anti American. And anyway, that's the idea of it. Yeah, well, and it's mirrored on the left with this notion that racial identity in particular is morally and politically paramount. And anything you would say against, let's say, Islam on the left will be immediately conflated with an attack on people for the color of their skin or the origin of their birth. Whereas it's always, certainly in the context of a conversation like this, a criticism of ideas and their consequences. Right. If I'm going to criticize neo Nazis, I'm not criticizing white people. I'm criticizing terrible ideas. And when I'm criticizing Islamism or Jihadism, I'm not criticizing Arabs or any other ethnicity. I'm criticizing the consequences of ideas. Yes. The fact that people can't track this continues to be bewildering. Yeah, well, part of it is that they can track it, and they're deciding not to. And the other problem, right, is that we have a president who does exactly the opposite. He attacks people not based on their ideas often, but based on immutable characteristics like their race or their gender or their religion. Obviously, that's mutable, but that's part of the problem, is that the second he touches something, it becomes toxic. Let's take a moment to just remind people a little bit more about the history of antisemitism in the US. Because it reaches further back than I think most people realize. So let's just briefly talk about the 1930s and what you do in the book. Well, it's amazing to me that most people my age have never heard of the name Charles Cochrane, but that's a name that if you were at all involved in the Jewish community, that is very, very familiar. He was the radio host, sort of the Rush Limbaugh of his day, I guess. Different, but very, very popular in the same way. Much more popular. I think something like 30 million Americans listen to him every week. He's someone he was a priest who's based in Michigan. He got so many letters that the town he was from actually had to build a new post office to keep up with the amount of mail he received. He was just hugely, hugely popular. And this was something who, you know, told 30 million Americans that the Jews deserved. Crystal Nacht he talked about the Jews as modern shylocks who have grown fat and wealthy. I mean, these are some of the most sort of old, vile antisemitic tropes, and you could hear them on the radio in America in the 1930s. Henry Ford people think of Henry Ford as the automaker, which of course, he was. But he had a Hitler shouted him out in mine comp, he was awarded this thing called the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, which was the highest honor the Nazis gave. And I think there was a short film made about this next thing I'll tell you, which is I really recommend to people at six or seven minutes, and you can watch, you know, 39, 20,000 people showed up at madison Square Garden to raise their arms to HIL Hitler and stood beneath signs saying, you know, smash Jewish communism and stop the Jewish domination of Christian Americans. So that all happened here. And yet still and this is the thing that I find fascinating, I was still very much and I don't know about you, Sam raised on the idea that America was uniquely inoculated from the virus of antisemitism that was just much more natural, or so I was taught in places like France and Germany and England. Yeah, it actually wasn't until I read the book the Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman, which I think came out in the mid 80s, that I understood just how touch and go the history is here. I mean, you literally had Congressmen giving antisemitic speeches on the floor of Congress while the Holocaust was raging. And we understood the shape of it. I mean, it's mind boggling that the history was what it was. And you could add Charles Lindbergh to the list of prominent figures who got singled out for Nazi accolades. And Charles Cochrane was a Catholic priest. So he links up with a larger trend of Catholic fascism or fondness for fascism and explicit antisemitism. And all of this, of course, is cashed out in Christian theology, both Catholic and Protestant theology. The Protestants are hardly better. Once Martin Luther got an audience, he started raging against the Jews. Really an explicitly eliminationist vein. And you cite some of this in your book, that the New Testament has several verses that seem to justify antisemitism outright. Yeah, the most famous of which is, I think it's in the Book of Matthew, his blood be on us and on our children, which was used to justify untold amounts of violence. It's such a historically bloody line that even Mel Gibson, who right now is making a movie called the Rothschilds, and I'm not kidding, even he in Passion of the Christ, which was Naramaic, didn't translate the verse into English. That's how controversial it's been. But of course, there was Vatican too. And I don't want to undo the amount of progress that's happened because of course it has. Yes. But again, the progress has to grapple with the fact that obviously there's an incoherence here because there are antisemitic lines in the Bible and 2000 years of theologically mandated antisemitism resulted. And yet Jesus and the twelve apostles and the Virgin Mary were all Jews. How there could have been such a durable basis for Jew hatred is a little hard to square. Except for the fact that it really was a kind of Interneting schism. Exactly. In the religion you have Jews who were, in order to maintain their Judaism, had to explicitly reject the Messiah status of Jesus. And that is the founding sin that really is unforgivable if you're a dogmatic Christian. Yeah. The other thing that just going back a bit to American history pieces after Pittsburgh, there was a lot of talk about how there had never been an attack on a synagogue. Actually, there had never been that many people killed in a synagogue. That was true. And it was by far the most violent attack against Jews in American history. Also true. But there had been and this was one of the things I was shocked to find out a lot of attacks on synagogues, a lot, and I sort of go through them in the book. And the ones that stick out to me the most were these sort of spate of attacks specifically targeting civil rights, supporting rabbis in the south, in Mississippi and in Atlanta specifically. And one of the occasions they actually went and I believe bombed the house of the rabbi. That was news to me. I had not grown up learning about that at all. Yeah, there's an ambient level of antisemitic hate crime in the US. And there has always been and I've always been somebody who, as a Jew, have minimized its significance. I mean, it's always felt to me that antisemitism is not a major problem in the US. And even as shocking as the murder of dozens of people in any given year is we're not talking about 911 scale terroristic atrocities against Jews in general. Obviously it could get a lot worse. But the thing to point out is that all of the people who complain about hate crimes against other groups, in particular Muslims in the US. Have been complaining about a level of hate which has always been less than the level of hate crime against Jews. I mean, any given year, if you look at FBI statistics and you look for hate crimes against mosques and Muslims, it's always less than the number of hate crimes against Jews and synagogues. And these are mostly property crimes in most cases. And again, I don't mean to minimize it for the people who suffer it directly, but in a country of 330,000,000 people, the numbers are not that high, but it's generally ignored by I mean, we just we have to make apples to apples comparisons here. If you're going to derange our politics over how awful it's been getting for Muslims in the United States, it would be only decent to notice that the numbers for of the same sorts of insults and crimes against Jews has, for every year since 911 been five acts. Work Teams More if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.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@samharris.org. Thank you./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with David Benatar. David is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He's the author of a few books Better Never To Have Been, the Harm of Coming Into Existence and most recently, The Human Predicament a Candid Guide to Life's biggest questions. And he's a philosopher whom many of you have wanted me to speak with. I've been getting emails and tweets about him for quite some time. He is perhaps the most prominent exponent of a philosophy called Antinatalism and you will hear much more about that in today's episode. The question for David really is whether or not existence is worth the trouble. And he answers that question with an emphatic no. And this makes for an interesting conversation. As you'll hear, there are a couple of places where our intuitions diverge and I think you just have to pick which intuition you find most compelling there. But we talk about many interesting things. We talk about the asymmetry between the good and bad things in life, the ethics of existential risk, the difference between starting and continuing a life. He sees those as very different. Our built in bias towards existence and how that may confuse us. The relationship between Antinatalism and another position called promortalism. The idea that it would be a good thing if we all died in our sleep. Tonight I talked for a few minutes about my notion of the moral landscape. And we also talk about the the limits and paradoxes of introspection. How viewing your life in a certain way can actually change what there is to notice about your life. And there are many other topics here. Population ethics is a very rich conversation for those of you who like moral philosophy. And it got me to realize at least one thing that resolves for me at least one of the troubling paradoxes in Derek Parfit's philosophy. So I found it a very valuable conversation and I hope you do as well. And now I bring you David Benatar. I am here with David Benatar. David, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Nazi with you. So I've been hearing about you for at least a year. I plead unfamiliarity with your books, but people have been emailing me about you. I think they have read some of your articles and some undoubtedly have read your books, but you have been laying out a philosophy that is quite novel and quite pessimistic and quite interesting that really strikes to the very core of the question, is life worth living? And your answer to that is a resounding no, at least for those who don't yet exist. And no doubt most of what is interesting in moral philosophy can be brought to bear on this question. Before we dive into your philosophy, give us just a kind of a potted history of what you've been doing intellectually and the kinds of questions you've focused on. Well, this is one question that I've sort of revisited on multiple occasions and also examined issues related to it. I suppose my broad interests are in moral philosophy, more specifically in practical ethical questions. But often when I look at the practical ethical questions, I'm interested in the theoretical issues that lie behind them. And I suppose in this area of procreate of ethics, those two come together quite well. But I have written about other topics as well. Another book that I wrote is called The Second Sexism, which is about discrimination against men and boys. And then I've written on a range of practical ethical questions. And you're currently a professor of philosophy? That's correct. In Cape Town. So let's just jump in, because this really is fascinating. You describe your view as antinatalism. Is that a coinage from you, or did that view exist before you started working in this area? I've been asked that question, and quite frankly, I don't know the answer. Whether I coined the term or whether I heard it somewhere, I've tried to do some sort of intellectual archeology to find out whether I did hear it from somewhere else, and I've been unsuccessful. But the idea itself, I think, dates back to much earlier times. One hears it even in ancient times, the idea that it would have been better never to have been born. And a more recent exponent, of course, was Arthur Schopenhauer. So these ideas have been around for a long time, and that doesn't surprise me. Yeah, it's interesting. There's quite a convergence between your view and Buddhism. I'm sure someone must have pointed that out to you at some point. Yes, exactly, they have. Perhaps we'll touch on that because I have a long standing interest in Buddhism and related practices like meditation. So just lay out the argument for antinatalism. Make the case for us at the outset here. Well, perhaps I should clarify what the view is first. So it's the view that we ought not to bring new people into existence, but I think the view is broader that we ought not to bring new sentient beings into existence. Right. So it's not just the view that it's harmful to come into existence, but a further view that it's also wrong to bring beings into existence. And I think there are a range of arguments for this position. Some of them I characterize as philanthropic arguments, and others I think are misanthropic arguments. And here, of course, I'm restricting the scope to bringing human beings into existence, although I think that parallel points might be able to be made about other sentient beings. The original arguments that are advanced are the philanthropic ones, and those really are concerned about the being that you'll bring into existence. And my view is not only that it's always a harm for that being, but that it's also a very serious harm. And given the seriousness of that harm, I think that it's always going to be wrong to create a new being. More recently, I've developed some misanthropic arguments, and those have to do with the harm that the being you're bringing to existence will do to others. And by others I mean other human beings, but also other sentient beings on the planet. So those are two broad kinds of arguments, and although one is philanthropic and the other is misanthropic, I don't think that these two are incompatible with one another. So just to revisit a few of those utterances, unless they blow by and their significance be lost on some of the audience here. So one of the consequences of your view is that it really is a monstrous crime to have children. At a minimum, it's a colossal act of negligence on the part of people who haven't really thought about these issues clearly enough. And it's kind of analogous on your view to ushering souls into hell, because existence is either that bad or there's a high enough probability that it will be that bad that it's just irresponsible to consign people to the fate of existing. That's correct. Of course, hell comes in degrees, so as bad as it is, it can always be worse. And so we need to be careful about that analogy of ushering somebody into hell. But it's a kind of hell. I love this topic, and I think this will be fun to get into the details here and hear some more of your specific arguments. But what has been your experience promulgating this idea or set of ideas? I can imagine the thesis provokes anger in some people, that's for sure. A lot of angry people. Fortunately, not too many of those have made direct contact with me. But one does see a lot of hate mail of a certain kind and a lot of hate comments on the web. But the people who have contacted me tend to be those who have been more sympathetic to my views. And one very common kind of response I've received is from people who've had these sorts of thoughts and felt that they were entirely alone in the world. They thought that they were the only people who thought this, and they've drawn a measure of comfort from knowing that there are others who share that idea. One distinction to make here is between pessimism of the sort that you're expressing and nihilism your view really isn't nihilistic. Do you want to tease those apart? Yeah, you're absolutely right. Many people, I think, mischaracterize the position as the nihilistic position. And I'm not a nihilist. I think that suffering, for example, is bad and that's one of the reasons why I think it's wrong to bring new beings into existence because they're going to suffer and they're going to suffer pretty unspeakably. Nealism here would be that basically nothing matters, right? In a scheme of things, good and bad are just things we make up and the universe doesn't care about us. And therefore it doesn't really matter if conscious minds get ground up in some inferno interminably. That's not your view at all. You want to avoid the inferno and you want to avoid committing the moral wrong of consigning people to it. That's exactly right. Look, I am a nearest of some kind, so if you ask me about whether our lives have cosmic meaning, I'm a Nealist about that. I don't think that they do. But I just don't think that it follows from that that it's okay to inflict suffering on others. I can imagine that people also try to psychologize you. They must think that this view is really not so much the product of a valid chain of reasoning. It's the product of a likely mood disorder. Are you depressed? Is that a diagnosis you must get hurled at you? Yeah, there are lots of people who do exactly that. They try to psychologize it and I think that's exactly the wrong attitude to have. I think one should look at the arguments, examine them on their merits and see whether they stand or fall. But I guess both things could be true. I find the arguments very interesting and we will definitely get into those. But when I heard about you and your emphasis on this position, I did think that your just experience of the world, moment to moment and that would include your mood and everything else about you that can be brought to bear on experience must be coloring the arguments or could be coloring your sense of their veracity or moral import. And I guess I'll tell you about an experience I had and I'm just wondering if there's anything about it that could be relevant to your case. So I had a friend, not a close friend, but someone who I had met many, many times and this was a person who would email me periodically who was suicidal and he had been suicidal for quite some time. At one point he sent an email to everyone in his life saying, I'm going to commit suicide and here's your last chance to talk me out of it. Put that way, it sounds like a kind of macabre and gratuitous appeal for attention. But he was actually just being scrupulous to not kill himself so impulsively that he would leave everyone in his life feeling like if only they had known, they might have been able to do something. So he was going to give everyone his life a chance to reason with him. And it was kind of of a piece with the reasons why he thought he was killing himself. He really thought he had reasoned himself to a position where suicide was not only acceptable, but was really his best decision. And he had a very philosophy. He wasn't a professional philosopher, but he had a very philosophical cast of mind and he was quite smart. And I went back and forth with him a little bit over email mostly. And the experience was one of seeing someone, in my view, mistake his anhedonia, his lack of joy in living moment to moment for a kind of philosophical epiphany. Which is to say if he felt better, if he was feeling more joy, if he was feeling more of a connection to other people, he would have felt that the results of his reasoning on each of those points were less compelling. And I know your argument is not an argument for suicide, it will differentiate antinatalism from that. But I'm just wondering if you feel that if the character of your experience were significantly better moment to moment, if you feel like this philosophical conviction would just kind of evaporate or become so uninteresting to you that it would sort of evaporate. Well, I don't like to talk about myself, so I'm probably just not going to answer that question. But I'll make a few observations. And one is that I ought not to make the assumption that somebody who holds the sort of view that I do is thinking about themself. They may be thinking about themselves as well, but they might be just thinking about everything they see around them in the world. So just if you think about the amount of suffering that's going on in the world at any moment, you have to be precourse and callous to not take that seriously. So it needn't be about one's own experiences, it needn't be about one's own attitudes. It might be sort of sensitivity or an expression of what's going on in the world. So you sort of gave an example that's very self oriented. And what I'm suggesting is that's not the only possible way of looking at things. It's also possible to arrive at these sorts of views by looking outward and looking and seeing what you see around you. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. And then of course, the other point is that you spoke about him being anodonic, but there are plenty of manic people out there and their views might be colored by their mania. They may be deriving too much pleasure to actually see the world for what it is. Yeah, it's hard to know what is normal here or what is an uncooled lens through which to look at these questions. And there may in fact be no uncolored lens, it may just be lenses all the way in. So let's get into the details of your argument run through the asymmetry argument for me. So there's actually more than one asymmetry argument, but there isn't kind of axiological, asymmetry, I think, between benefits and harms, between the good things and the bad things. And obviously, if we're speaking within a life, the pains that you have, the other harms that you have, these are bad, and the good things that you have, those are good. But if we considering the scenario in which somebody is going to be brought into existence, we have to compare the outcome in which they do from the outcome in which they don't exist. And in the outcome which they don't exist, we have to consider the absent harms and the absent benefits. And I think that the absence of the harms is good even though that person won't exist, whereas the absence of the good things in that life is not going to be bad. And that's because nobody is going to be deprived of those good things. And so the asymmetry is really between the bad and the good in the scenario in which somebody doesn't exist. Okay? So it strikes me I kind of want to run through each piece of that again so that to make sure that I'm not making a mistake here in reasoning. But it strikes me that there's kind of an imbalance here in how you're presenting that. And you could be conjuring the the asymmetry in a way. So you're saying and just point out where I go wrong here. You're saying that the absence of a good life can't be a harm because there's no one who is harmed. There's no person who is deprived of this life. So the absence of goods is not a bad thing, but the absence of a bad life is a good. Here you in my view, you're you're kind of smuggling the absence of existence in as part of the good. You're saying that the prevention of harm is a positive good, even though there is no one who enjoys this absence of harm. Is that where you're kind of putting the rabbit in the hat? Well, a lot of people have suggested that I'm doing that. But the point I'm making here is not so much a metaphysical one as an axiological one. It's about an asymmetry in of values between the good things and the bad things in life. And one of the reasons why I think first of all, I think this asymmetry is actually pretty intuitive, and I think large numbers of people would accept it until they see where it leads. But this basic asymmetry, I think, explains some other asymmetries that many people would endorse. So here's an example. There are large parts of the universe that are uninhabited. There aren't beings. There certainly not sentient beings. And if we think about those uninhabited parts of the universe, we're not filled with, and nor do I think we should be filled with remorse for the absent goods that they are there. So if we think about Mars, for example, where they could be Martians but they aren't, we don't think, gee, think about all that pleasure that those absent Martians could have. Isn't that a terrible thing? We don't think that at all. Whereas think if we think about the absence of, let's say, Martian wars, just like we have wars on Earth, and we think about the absence of all the suffering there, I think we said that's a pretty good thing. It's pretty good that they don't have that there, that there's nothing like that on Mars. That's an advantage that Mars has over Earth, but there's no one who doesn't have those harms. Exactly. But I still think that it's a good thing that there's the absence of that suffering on Mars. Now, I'll grant you that there are many other possible asymmetries here that we should be concerned about. So, for instance, one thing you claim, or at least I think it's implicit in some of your claims, is that there is much more suffering or possible suffering than there is possible happiness, or the depth of it is far greater. And so there's an asymmetry between suffering and happiness that also just swings the balance here. So we'll talk about that. But here, I feel like you're running afoul of my intuitions here. And what you just said about the moral significance of canceling possible goods definitely stands in opposition to the work of every philosopher who is working on what is called existential risk. Now, so you can have philosophers like Will McCaskill who will say that the greatest possible wrong would be to do something which put our species on track for self annihilation. And that would be, in large measure, not because of all the suffering that would be caused, because if we're annihilated in the right way, it could be completely painless. It would be wrong because it would close the door to all of the untold goods that could come from a billion years of creative involvement with the cosmos. If you knew that there was some decision you took today that not only deprived your grandchildren from living the most glorious possible life, they just have a sort of glorious life, but you deprived all of their descendants from even existing and discovering greater depths of beauty. People are persuaded, and I'm one of them, that those hypothetical losses are as real as the hypothetical gain of not suffering if you don't exist. So I think that when we think about human extinction, there's something that clouds people's thinking. And that's why the moment you think about the application of this asymmetry to human extinction, all these other intuitions of the kind bribing come up. That's why the example I gave wasn't about human extinction. It was a base of some other species, let's say, on another planet that could have been there and isn't there. And we don't spend any time worrying about that, nor do I think we should spend any time worrying about the absent pleasures over there. When we think about human extinction, there are some confounding variables. One is the mechanism whereby the extinction takes place. So there's a distinction between whether people sort of die out or whether they're killed off. And so one way in which we could go extinct is through people meeting an untimely end and being killed. But another way is for everybody to die peacefully in their beds and for the human species to have come to an end because there was no more reproduction. And I think a lot of what's going on with people's intuitions is a mixing up of those things. And then I think there's a lot of sentimentality about the human species. There's this idea that it's a wonderful species and we'd like you to be around for a long time, and haven't we discovered and done all sorts of wonderful things and wouldn't be good if that whole trajectory of scientific discovery went on? And there's a kind of sentimentality about having humans around. So I think that those sorts of factors confound our thinking about cases of human extinction. So I would like to move away from those to think of the application of the asymmetry to other cases and see how it works. Granted, some people might be confounded. I don't think I am here. In fact, I think there are a few more things to say about just canceling the human career that are relevant here. But before we do, I just want to linger on this. What strikes me as kind of an asymmetry that is giving you your first asymmetry here, which is you're accruing a good to nonexistent beans on one side of your equation where you're not on the other. Do you not see it that way, or you just think it's justified? No, I do see it that way, but I think it's justified. There is this axiological asymmetry, and I think when you do the calculation that follow from that the cards are stacked against bringing somebody into existence, but it's not an artificial stacking. It's one that makes eminent sense. I guess it's still not making sense to me. So let's just spend a few more minutes on this. So we have a person who could have existed but doesn't. And undoubtedly there are philosophical problems with thinking about possibility as well. Are there these possible things, or are there simply actual things and we're actually just misled by our notion of possibility? But leaving that aside, I might have had a I have two children which already convinced me of a monstrous ethical lapse on your account, but we'll leave that aside. But I have I have decided not to have a third child, you'll be happy to know. So this third child will not experience anything good or anything bad. And on your account, there's no deprivation to him or her for not being brought into existence on account of not getting to do all the good things there are to do. But there is a benefit to not suffering all of the inevitable pains of existence but that benefit doesn't accrue to anyone because no one by this description exists. That's correct. And it's impossible, of course, if the person doesn't exist for them to enjoy the benefit. But when we're looking at scenarios of bringing somebody into existence or not we're having to compare those two cases one scenario in which they do exist and one in which they don't. And if we want to know what's better for that potential person we need to compare the situation in which they do in the situation in which they don't. And we have to compare, obviously, the scenario in which they don't exist to the one in which they do and make the interest judgments relative to the world in which the person does exist. How would this calculation run for you if existence was, on balance, more pleasant and wonderful and creative and beautiful so that every person who comes into existence runs a better than even chance of having a life worth living? But still there are many lives that are not worth living and they come up quite frequently. They just don't overwhelm the lives that are worth living. Then how would you think about it? Well, that very phrase a life worth living I think is ambiguous and I think it's ambiguous between a life worth starting and a life worth continuing. And I think one mistake people make is to not see that ambiguity because I think different standards ought to apply to those two cases. So if at a given time there's more good in your life than bad then your life may indeed be worth continuing? I say may indeed because there's some complexities there that we could revisit later but I think the bar for starting a life is going to be much higher. Let's stick with the starting of life because we'll get on to whether life is worth continuing. Let's just say that we lived in a world where at birth every human being could expect to have a a slightly better than even chance. I mean, basically they're like the house in a casino playing blackjack, right? They have whatever it is a 52% chance of winning. And winning in this case really is winning. Right? There's no downside to winning. It's just the 52% of people who have good lives on balance really do have good lives on balance any way you look at them. And then the 48% of people who don't have negative lives to one or another degree then how would you think about it? Well, I think even the lives that are good on balance there's going to be plenty of bad. But let's just stipulate that we live in a world that's kind of like a coin toss and if the right side of the coin comes up that is a life on balance however you want to aggregate benefits and injuries. So I'm not quite understanding the question here, because if the analogy is sort of winning at blackjack well, when you win, you win. There's no downside to the winning. Whereas when you win in this life lottery that you're speaking about, what I want to get clarity on is, is there no downside? Is this a life of unmitigated good or is there some negative as well? And from what you said, I was understanding, you ought to be saying that there is some bad as well. It's just that on balance, it's good. I guess there could be some bad. But it is in the case of the lucky life, it is outweighed by the good so that each of your pains are manageable enough that when your pleasure comes around, you always feel that it was worth it. And let's just say that you're right to feel that we've tuned the luck of lucky minds in such a way that life is really good and pain does not overwhelm pleasure. Okay? You see, when you say that you think it's worth it, are you saying it's worth it to have come into existence or that it's worth it to continue existing? I am without granting you that distinction because I'm not sure I agree that exists, but we'll get there for the purposes of this point in the conversation, I'm talking about coming into existence so you don't exist, and I give you the opportunity to exist. And if you were one of the lucky ones, you would find yourself in a circumstance that was well worth your time. Well, that I think, is a confusion. I grant you that there are many people who say, I'm glad I was brought into existence because I think on balance, it's better that I'm around. I think I'm getting more good than I am getting bad. But I just think that people who hold that view have not thought carefully enough about what the question is. I think that because they already exist, they biased towards the condition in which they already exist. And so what they're actually asking themselves without realizing it is, is my life worth continuing? But I don't think there's any life that's worth starting, and I think there's no life that's worth starting because of this. Asymmetry surely you would grant that if existence were much, much better than it is. In fact, you could imagine a life worth living, right? What if existence just had no suffering at all in it, right? It was just one leap from creative height to another, and every moment was more interesting than the last. So I've considered that possibility, and I think in that scenario we should be indifferent between coming into existence and not. But I got to say that that scenario you've imagined is actually pretty hard to imagine in practice. Hard to imagine any real. Such life. But yes, if we're thinking about hypothetically, a hypothetical life where you come into existence and there's nothing bad about that, then I would say I've been different between that. And I think we should be indifferent between coming into existence in that condition and not coming into existence at all. That is a novel view that I have never considered. I'm wondering whether to focus there for a moment before going on to capture some of these loose threads. Let's spend a moment on that. If I posit a kind of Godlike paradise for all conscious beings, right? So there really is just there's nothing wrong in the universe. Anything that you can say is wrong. Like there's a little ache and pain over here, there's a little dissatisfaction over here. I will just cancel that by saying no, those are moments where there's more pleasure flooding in there and more even deeper sense of meaning, even deeper gratification of one's intellectual life. And these are beings who are far more competent than you and I are. To judge the character of their experience. They've had a billion years to consider the matter, and they're still happy to be here. Imagine minds constituted like that. Why should we be indifferent to that? And the primordial dial tone of nonexistent. See, I think what's dividing us here is the asymmetry. Because if you think there is the asymmetry that I'm defending, then you'll say, well, there's nothing bad in that Edenic life that you're speaking about, but there's also nothing bad in the situation of nonexistence. So they're there equal. Now you'll say, but in Eden there are all these pleasures. And I say, that's great, because if you're in Eden, it's good that you have those pleasures, because your life would be worse without them. But if you've never existed, the absence of those pleasures is going to mean nothing to you. You won't be there, you won't care about it. It doesn't matter that there's not a being that's having those pleasures. So if you think about Adam and Eve and then some third character that could have been there this is before the fall, obviously, and you say, well, is it a pity that there's not some additional being here that's not enjoying Eden? No, I don't think there's anything bad about that. And I think there's an indifference, and there should be an indifference. I can see that there's nothing bad about it because there's no one to suffer the absence of those pleasures and insights. But again, by the same token, I'm not convinced that you can make the other move you're making, which is to say that there's something good about not having the suffering imposed on you if you don't exist. If you don't exist, you can't feel the relief of not being tortured because you don't exist. So I feel like there's a symmetry there of just non being. Let's come back to your third possible child. Let's imagine you were thinking about having a third child, and you did some genetic tests and you found out that this child that you could have would lead a life that even by your standards is one of great suffering. And so you decide, well, we're not going to go ahead with this third child. We're not going to have this third child. Do you think that would be a good thing? Yes. And do you think you've got a reason to avoid bringing that child into existence? But the reason is one which is predicated on the existence of the child and therefore the existence of his or her suffering. We're talking here about the absence of a wrong that I'm not committing by bringing this guaranteed to suffer person into existence. So you're imagining some scenario in which this child does exist and is leading a life of suffering, and you say, Well, I've got a reason to avoid that. Right. Now, let's imagine that you're thinking of having this third child and you do the tests and everything's fine. And so it could turn out like your other children are. I don't know your children, I hope they're doing well as well as can be, but let's imagine they're doing well in the third child. The probabilities that it'll be like that, let's just say on their worst afternoons, they'll confirm everything you fear about the nature of existence by your children. They can complain about the most insubstantial things, and you'd be amazed at how much anguish can be provoked by having the television turned off prematurely. Right. But let's imagine that this third child would lead a happy life by your standards. Right. Do you have a reason to bring that child into existence? Well, let's leave aside all the other reasons that no doubt you've considered just, you know, their effect on other people, their effect on me, all that just so just localizing the benefit to the person? Yes, I think so. I think that there's I mean, this this comes down to population ethics and topics that I hope will touch, but there is a kind of more is better principle here when you're talking about good lives. These are all fascinating questions, and they connect to more or less everything that's fascinating. So I'm just trying to resist the slide into philosophy here, but it seems to me that much of what you're saying about bringing people into existence does in fact apply to the continuing existence of existing people. I know you draw a clear line of demarcation there. I'm not so sure you can. And I think this is an additional problem for me here. So how is it not analogous for me to say, well, I have a child and there was something very, very good that could have happened to her. I could have secured some benefit for her that she doesn't know about, but I declined to do that. Right. So she has the life she has, but I could have given her the super enhanced life with really very little effort on my part. You're talking about an existing child. An existing child. But I declined to do that. So now she has her life as it was and was going to be, but it could have been otherwise. And I, for quite capricious reasons of my own, you know, because I didn't want to spend 10 seconds to sign a form or click a button on a website. She does not have this extraordinarily positive thing happen for her, and she doesn't know about it. Right. So has she been wronged in any way? And I think most people's intuitions would be yes. And yet, on your account, I'm wondering if I could say that, well, we're talking about a case of an existing child here, and I think there are all kinds of other complexities about this case. Whether she had some entitlement to your bestowing, this benefit. There are all kinds of questions of that kind. But you are speaking about an existing child, and so I would say that this child is worse off without this benefit having been bestowed. So whether you've wronged her is another question. But she's worse off than she would have been if you had bestowed this benefit. But I don't think that a parallel claim can be made about a child that you don't bring into existence, although if it had come into existence, it would have had certain benefits. I think the absence of those benefits because it doesn't come into existence is not bad. And it's not bad because it's not deprived, whereas your existing child will be deprived of this benefit you could have given. Another point of confusion for me here is that you acknowledge a spectrum of experience ranging from the very, very positive to the very, very negative. But when you take the zero point of nonexistence, you say that we should be indifferent between zero and the very, very positive, whereas we shouldn't be indifferent between zero and the very, very negative. The very, very negative is worse, obviously, and we should avoid it, and we should choose zero every time over the very, very negative. But we should be indifferent to zero over the very, very positive. But I'm not quite sure how that would work in practice. So imagine if we were sliding down the ramp of hedonic experience. We start at the very, very positive, and life gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse until it gets truly neutral. And maybe there's other forms of neutral beyond the lights going out, but at least one form of neutral is not having any discernible experience. And then we just keep on sliding and things get a little bit bad and a little bit worse, and all of a sudden we're in hell. It seems to me that if you're going to preserve the logical integrity of that spectrum, you have to acknowledge that better really is better than nothing. Again, I don't think that it is. This assignment of zero that you're proposing is something that I've anticipated before. And I've got an analogy to to deal with a case like of course, it's an only an analogy. It can't be a like the case that we're speaking about in every respect. But I imagine these two people one is we call him sick and the other we call healthy. And sick gets sick. But he's also got some attribute whereby he recovers quickly from his sickness. Healthy never gets sick. I mean, never, never, ever gets sick. But he lacks the attribute of quick recovery. So if h were to were to get sick, he wouldn't quickly recover. It would be a very slow, very slow recovery. Now, what I want to say about sick is that that capacity for quick recovery, that that's good and it's good for sick, but the absence of that capacity in the healthy person is not a net disadvantage over sick because he never has any need for that. Right? I think we should say a similar thing about these scenarios about existing and nonexisting and that these absent pleasures are not bad relative to the other scenario. In other words, they're not a net disadvantage in comparison with the scenario in which the person exists. So I want to resist that sort of attribution of, let's say, zero to the absence of the pleasures or the absence of the good things in life if they're the absent good things of a non existent person. So not all of my intuitions are being conserved here. I will say here on this point, your view is especially Buddhist and for people who might be surprised by that and I don't know how familiar you are with Buddhist philosophy, but I'll just say that on the Buddhist account, existence is the problem. And they have this obviously this view of rebirth and karma and there's what's called a wheel of becoming life after life. You just can't get off this wheel unless you become fully enlightened. Enlightenment consists in no longer being subjected to this continuous cycle of rebirth. There's obviously very good reason to doubt that picture of existence scientifically. But the core of the ethical view there and the soteriological view, the view of what it means to be free is that existence has this intrinsically unsatisfying character. And this is for reasons that we really haven't gone into yet. It's just the fact that everything is impermanent. Your pleasures, no matter how good, always fall away and you're left with more of a search for pleasure. There's a kind of an intrinsic dissatisfaction even in satisfaction. It wouldn't be bad if no one existed. And the fact that people exist in a circumstance that is perfect to frustrate the search for happiness and well being is the problem. And enlightenment is the act of canceling all of the mental properties that would cause one to continually be reborn into existence. So your view is very Buddhist without offering the methodology of enlightenment or unless you do that, and I don't know about it or the odd metaphysics of reincarnation. Exactly. Yeah. But there are a few other wrinkles here in Buddhism, and one is that it's possible, through a really deep engagement in methods like meditation, to come to a kind of equanimity that equalizes pain and pleasure to a remarkable degree and to find a kind of intrinsic wellbeing in just the nature of consciousness. And that does make some of this some of the Buddhist view that I just described somewhat paradoxical. I mean, it's not the problem of existence can really go away to a remarkable degree on the Buddhist account. That's all just a long way of saying that your view is in very good standing with certain trends in in Eastern philosophy, and it just doesn't capture everything they say. But let's take this distinction between the possible lives and the existing lives and their interests, because I'm not so sure you're conserving my intuitions there. Why would it be a bad thing for everyone to die tonight, painlessly in their sleep? Let's just picture what this entails. So everyone goes to sleep none the wiser. They don't know this is their last day on Earth. There's been no dread in anticipation of the lights going out, but everyone, based on some bad luck or good luck, depending on your view, dies painlessly in his or her sleep. So there's no bereavement. There's no experience of this. There's just the lights going out in 7 billion brains all at once. What could be wrong with that? Well, I think that those of us who do exist have an interest in continuing to exist. We've got an interest in not being annihilated. And the scenario you are presenting is one in which we are annihilated. Why do we have an interest in being reborn tomorrow from the womb of sleep if existence is, as you say, such that bringing people into it is a terrible crime? Well, I think the analogy is not correct. I don't think we are reborn. We reborn in a metaphorical sense, but not literally. I think there are all kinds of things that are going on in our sleep. We're continuing to exist in a kind of dispositional state. Our interests in continuing to live are surviving through that period of sleep, as are many of our desires and our preferences. And I think if we die in our sleep, one of our interests and very important interests, at least one, if not many of them, have been thwarted. I can't see how we have any more interest than a new being would. Again, you have to imagine just canceling all of the usual problems with people dying, right? They don't know they're going to die, so there's no imposed suffering in advance, and there's no one around to suffer their loss. There's no grief. There's not even a single neuron in a single brain disposed to grieve about what's happened because no one knows that it will happen and no one's around to know that it has happened. How is that not analogous to someone not coming into existence on the next day? Because somebody who doesn't exist, I think, has got no interest in coming into existence, but somebody who already exists has got an interest in not ceasing to exist. Now, one thing I should add here is that I think these two views are separable. In other words, the asymmetry argument that I've given before and the argument that I'm giving you now, these are two separate arguments. So it's possible for an antinatalist to also be a promotionist of the kind that you're suggesting. So if somebody thinks that a painless death or they say death itself is not bad for the person who dies, and then we add all the stipulations that you've added. If somebody thinks that, then they say there's nothing wrong with the scenario. There's nothing bad about the scenario you've described. But that's a separate view from the tree that I've been presenting. So you can have the asymmetry that I presented earlier, and then you can either couple that with a view I'm offering now about ceasing to exist, or you needn't couple it with that. That's precisely the point. I don't see how you can keep them apart if existence has the character that you say that it has. And I would grant you, you're on very firm ground thinking that pains are worse than pleasures and that there are more of them, and we can talk about that. But if it really is bad to be brought into the world, and not just a little bad, it's really, really bad, then I don't see how that doesn't extend to the moral character of waking up the next day. And if I can give you a situation where there are no ancillary harms accrued by somebody dying. And implicit in everything you're saying about existence is the claim that all of these canceled goods of future people don't mean anything, right? I mean, there's no moral weight to place on all the good things that could have happened had humanity continued, because these are hypothetical goods that accrue to no one. How is it that having everyone die painlessly in their sleep wouldn't be on your account, a good thing, and in fact, perhaps the best possible thing we could imagine having happened? Like, if you could do it, if you could push that button, you wouldn't be a moral hero. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today I am speaking with Bill Maher and Larry Charles. Bill, you all know, I trust you know him principally from his HBO show Real Time, which I've been on a few times over the years. Bill is certainly one of our most politically engaged comics. He still does a ton of stand up and he's also an executive producer on Vice Media, on HBO and just a super productive guy. The occasion of this podcast was the 10th anniversary of his documentary Religious, which was directed by my other guest, Larry Charles. Now, Larry has been hugely influential in comedy. He wrote for The Seinfeld Show for the first five seasons. He also directed Sasha Baron Cohen's films Borat and Bruno. He's also worked on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage. He's just one of the 800 pound gorillas of comedy and also a very nice guy. I'd never met him before, but it was a real pleasure to sit down with him. And because we were celebrating the 10th anniversary of Religious, the first half of our conversation or so is focused on the film. So I think you'll enjoy that part more if you've actually seen the film. It's not that you'll have no idea what's going on if you haven't, but I recommend that you watch it. It's very funny. And again, even if you've seen it before, you just can't believe where people are at. On the topic of religion, it's really quite a view of the human mind, but otherwise we touch several other topics. We're mostly focused on the state of comedy and public conversation in general and politics. It was fun to have an excuse to get these guys on the podcast. And now I bring you Bill Maher and Larry Charles. So I'm here with Bill Maher and Larry Charles, which is quite an honor. We've never met, Larry, so I'm going to start with you, Bill. You actually need no introduction on my show. I will introduce you, but people out there going, larry, I think a bigger fan of yours than I realized because I read your bio in preparation for this conversation and realize that you've touched half of comedy in a very inappropriate way. So give us your potted bio me from Seinfeld on, because it is, I think, from Seinfeld. I thought that I was going to be a showrunner and make a lot of money and do that, and I did that for a few years, and it was a lot of fun, but I wasn't feeling any fulfillment at a certain point. And Larry David at one point came to me. I kind of had thought about directing for a long time. I was giving up on that dream as I sort of reached about 40, and Larry David literally came to me as he was doing Curb Your Enthusiasm, he was starting that show and said, hey, why don't you direct one of these? And I became a director, so I'm a very lucky person. And from there I met Bob Dylan, which is a long story, but we wound up collaborating on a script. We made a movie, but while we were writing the script, I was thinking, I'd go home every day and go, I should be directing this movie. How am I going to ask Bob Dylan to direct this movie? And one day I just kind of blurted it out and he went, okay. And then I directed directed that movie, and then I moved in that direction. I never made as much money again, but I wound up doing a lot of cool things, like religious as a result. You didn't make money on Borat? No, nobody made money on Borat, believe it or not. I mean, I made some money on Borat eventually, but I was paid pretty much the minimum to do that movie. That movie wasn't even going to get made. I mean, they didn't know what they had, but it was done in a very low budget. We need to fire your attorney, who we named him somebody met him, they're long gone. So curb your enthusiasm as well. Yes, but you've also dealt with a lot of great religious themes on Curb Your Enthusiasm as well. So we're here. The happy occasion is the 10th anniversary of religious. Was it 911 that put religion as a problem on your radar in a way that it hadn't been? Or had you been vocally worried about it prior to then? Well, I think that's somewhat covered I watched the religious. I hadn't seen it really since we made it. So I tend not to look back at my work because all you could do is obsess on I should have said this, I should have said that, I shouldn't have said this, but I think we did cover it in there that I was raised Catholic and never liked that very much. My father stopped going to Mass when I was a teenager, which was a hallelujah moment for me. And then for just the longest time, I didn't have Catholicism for sure, and I wasn't religious, but I didn't really think about it that much, and I just had God in my life as like when I got in trouble, oh please God, get me out of this one. I was one of those guys, but into your forty s, I think you say, yeah. And then at some point, that became ridiculous. And I realized I was making a fool of myself and just said full on and I don't know if 911 I don't remember that having a giant impact on me religious. Wise. But but in terms of your perception of it being a social problem that you had to comment on now, you had to be a vocal atheist talking about Islam and right. That certainly did move that to the forefront. Of course, it also caused me to lose the show as a forum. But we weren't off the air right away. We were on for another nine months. And those are my favorite nine months of Politically Incorrect because we were able to do a more serious kind of show. And we did talk the country was in a more serious mood and we were able to not do the show with Caratop and Pauly Shore and do ones with State Department officials and people like yourself. I didn't realize that it took nine months to that. Yes. The tragic events of 917, as we called it when I said the things that got me fired, that we didn't go off the air till the end of June 2002. How did it gain traction after nine months? Was there a continuous drumbeat to whistle you? I was never mad at ABC for canning us because it's a broadcast network and the advertisers did pull out. I was just mad at them because they lied and said we lost our viewership and our ratings, and our ratings never went down. The audience was not mad at me. We should remind people of what happened here. So you said the most frequent slur was that they were cowards. The 911 hijackers. Well, Dinesh D'Souza was the one who said it, and then I concurred, of course, he was at a cab when the controversy came. He did not want to be involved, but he was the one who said, these are he went on a whole rant about it. And I said, yeah, you're right. Strictly speaking, there is not a moral dimension to this. They stayed with the suicide mission. That's not cowardly. And then we were more cowardly. We meaning the society, not the military. That's what my enemies chose to interpret it as. But everyone knew I didn't mean that we were cowardly. Lopping cruise missiles from thousands of miles away. And that was the end of that. But, yeah, we were on for another nine months. And those were good months. Those were good times. Did they hassle you during that time, ABC? I mean, did you know that eventually it was going to come to an end? I'm surprised also to hear that it went on nine months. I don't think that's people's perception no, I thought it just the guillotine came down. Right. No, we had a contract and it was really to the end of the year, but then we all agreed I wanted to get onto the next show. I knew there was no future there. And I think one newspaper column referred to it as Dead Show Walking. Right. Which is what it was. But it was a good Dead show walking. It liberated you in a way. In a way, yes, it did. Yeah. So now, have you guys been professionally connected before? Religious or how did you guys no, we did not know each other personally. We had a lot of overlap in terms of friends and colleagues, but we had never hung out or met. And the great thing was, once we did, it was like it was very natural, as if we had known each other all those years. And I interviewed a number of directors, but I wanted to make a comedy. And, you know, as I watched this movie last night, I realized, boy, this could have gone terrible with a director who didn't fit it. But, I mean, this is it was the movie I wanted to make. But it really is like any movie, it's a director's movie. Larry made this movie with the cuts and the pacing, and there's a lot we worked on it together, but post production, I give him so much credit because there's so much funny stuff that is the result of these quick intercuts and juxtapositions and just the structure. And it's not a job. Most jobs in showbiz is, I think, yeah, I could do that. I couldn't do that. I can't be a director. Well, thank you. But I think again, not to throw it back at you, but it was an amazing collaboration and a great synthesis of our sensibilities and one of the greatest projects I ever worked on, also. Yeah, it was a joy from beginning to end. We did it with abandon. We had so much fun doing it. Counting that I'm a terrible traveler, I don't like traveling, especially overseas. But having said all that, I'm so glad we did it. And thanks for celebrating it with us. Yeah, so I just watched it again as well. I hadn't seen it since it's been close to ten years since I'd seen it. And we were talking about this just before we turned the mics on. The comedy holds up, and that isn't often true. I would say probably half the time I go back to some cherished comedy to watch with my wife, who may not have seen it, or with one of my daughters. It's just a stark encounter with the idiot you used to be or sometime some age of the earth that has elapsed. Everything just moves faster. Yeah. Try to watch a Hitchcock movie we just did last night. We walked out of north by northwest. Walked out and that's the best one. North. You couldn't get through north. It wasn't terrible, but it was just we've learned a lot about making movies in the intervening people just had their brains. This is your field. You're a neuroscientist. People's brains must have just been different because they were perfectly okay with things moving so much. Glacial. Glacial. I watched The Man Who what's? The Hitchcock movie he made. Like The Man Who Knew Too much. Yes. And it is glacial. That is the word for it. It's like, really, nothing goes on. It's so subtle. It's like, wow. All I kept thinking as I was suspense. Yes. People were different. Very different. Also, there was fake kissing that I never noticed before. The fake kissing isn't even an attempt to simulate real kissing. They just touch their faces together. Neither is violence. Right. We have too much violence now, and it's too graphic. But then it was ridiculous. People are being killed without any struggle and no blood, almost. Especially Indians, of course, Westerns. But that's another subject, I think, if I may. I think the reason that religious is still fresh, there's a number of really good reasons. For the first one, we're drawing on a thousands of year old tradition with religion. So in a way, it's kind of classic. Classic subject that had never been touched, humorously, satirically in a nonfiction setting. I mean, Life O'Brien is a brilliant movie also, but it's a fictional movie, and there have been other fictional comedies about religion. There had never been a nonfiction comedy, never been a documentary that tried to even be funny. How many documentaries are funny? So we had a very ambitious agenda, as it turned out, to tackle religion, be funny about it, and make a funny documentary. And so the subject matter was always ripe and never tapped into. And as we know, not enough has changed since the movie has been made, so that those jokes still resonate today to a large degree. And also the subject matter. We were ahead of the subject matter. I cited the stat on my show last Friday, that when we made the movie, 16% of people said in the Pew poll that they were of no religion. And now that is in some polls as high as 26%. So, in a way, the movie is ten years old and the public is still catching up to it. That's true. The subject. Right. So Bill referenced the technique you use of intercutting archival images, and it's pretty interesting because some of the shots that are landed against the interview subject are landed off camera. Right. So you're amplifying the fund that's being had at the person's expense. I mean, some of the blows land on camera because you and your interviews are pretty for the most part, I would say that's true. Yeah. But sometimes the person will be lying and you'll be subtitling their lives like, he didn't he's not a doctor. To cut away for 1 second to an old movie that just completely forgotten. I was laughing out loud. And in the case of people that are getting abused after the fact, we were very careful with our targets and the targets are hypocrites and liars. And would you love to do that in all of life? To be able to subtitle when people are bullshitting you? So I felt like that was all justified. It was funny and it was pointing out our basic itinerary on this journey, which was religion is really built on a lot of hypocrisy and lies and we were able to illuminate that constantly through the movie. Yeah. So I don't think the viewer ever feels like you unless they happen to be religious, I would imagine, but I don't think the viewer ever feels that you take an unfair shot at the targets. But I can imagine the targets did. Now, how are you just not trailing 1000 lawsuits with shooting a film? I guess probably even worse, the Sasha Baron Cohen stuff, right? Well, in both cases you have people sign releases beforehand and people don't read the fine print, frankly. And it says we could do anything we want with what we're about to shoot. And that's what we do. We do anything we want with it. So we try to stay ethical and we try to stay above board. But the fact is that usually the purpose of the interview, both with Bill and even with Sasha, was to illuminate some sort of underlying truth that's being concealed. And it takes sometimes interrogation techniques, comic interrogation techniques, as Bill uses so expertly, like with the senator, you see people who are saying things they know are not true, but they're stuck because they're going to get voted out of office and he doesn't let them off the hook. And that's one of the great things about him as a questioner, as an interviewer. So I felt like, yeah, this has to be hard hitting, but it'll pay off because it'll be really super funny. Also, I also was struck as I watched it, that it is so not mean spirited. Right. Because we're having a good time and we're laughing. And even when there's a number of times when I'm basically saying to somebody, in a way you're a fool or an idiot, I say to that Zeus guy, he said, no, really? Yes. And we looked it up. He wasn't resurrected. He was the second coming of Christ. And yet he died again, okay, this time of like liver failure or something. But he's jesus, Miranda. And I say, maybe you're the second coming of Carmen Miranda. You should have fruit on your head instead of fruit in your head, which is a terrible insult. But he's laughing. He was a good sport. He was the guy who sued us, the member, if you don't know me by now, singer, right, that's right, the preacher. Preacher with the winery. I'm insulting him, but it's with a laugh and he's laughing. And it just makes you think they all know it's a crack. They're selling the invisible product. I often tell people, because people say that I thought the people I believe that the Vatican needs to be dissolved. You need to sell off the assets. I mean, there's no way back from what's going on in the Catholic Church right now. But the most intelligent people we might have talked to in the entire journey were the priests at the Vatican. The Vatican priests were all PhDs, all know what's going on. Really smart guys. The guys who define for us where religion begins and where science begins and why they can overlap, they were very rational men who have to sell this thing to the masses. And the one guy who we see outside the Vatican but he's the one who took us in for that amazing tour. Exactly. You got kicked out of the Vatican. We weren't supposed to be in there in the first place. That guy who we see who's saying to me that when I say, doesn't this make you think? Oh, of course. Everything makes me think this is a croc. I mean, he was so upfront about it. He should have been hosting this movie. He was great. He was the Vatican Latinist. Latinist, yeah. He translated the letters either from Latin to English or English to Latin. Maybe both, but that was his job. He lived down the hall. We were in that hallway. No, I remember him telling us that he met the Pope the first week he was Pope in 1979 and hadn't seen him or talked to him since. That is how much the Pope carried. We also drank with him up there. Yes, we did. We all took a couple of shots from his model. Yeah, he looked like he was practiced in the arts, but he was quick to say, Christmas is ridiculous. Jesus here. He wouldn't live with the Vatican. He'd live out in the hills with the poor people. He was an iconoclast, standing right there in front of the Vatican and even said, People need their stories. Yeah. I mean, that's the ultimate mask drop, to say people need their stories. That's the magician going, See, the dub is right here. He was like a pen and teller of the Vatican priest. There was one guy you legitimately hated, though. That the rabbi who at one point you make the Holocaust joke. You say, Rabbi? Never again. I don't know who was you off camera. Larry off camera says something like, let's just get and you said, no, I'm out. I can't wait another second. Get a word in edgewise. Also, he had just met with Amma dinnershad. He did not think the state of Israel should exist. Right. And that the Holocaust was justified because the Jews had not been holy enough. So there was a lot to not like about him. Yeah. And he was unpleasant. He didn't present it in a charming way, his point of view. He had this insane verbal tick where he would say, don't interrupt me. Even in those moments where you had interjected your question in an appropriate silence where you had not interrupted him whenever you started, he would say, don't interrupt me. You interrupted his thoughts. Yeah. Bill, you cover your background a little bit. You actually have the same surprising fact in your bio that Hitch did, that you discovered your mother was Jewish late in life. How old were you? 13. hitchhi hitch was older than that. He was an adult when he learned this. You're technically Jewish according to the Jews they ever tried to coerce? Many times, and that always bothered me that other people are going to tell me what my religion is. And my mother was not a practicing Jew either, so it was culturally Jewish, and that's fine. And I'm a big supporter of the state of Israel, blah, blah, blah, but I never set foot in the temple. To this day, all my memories of religion are from Catholicism. And as my mother states in the beginning of the movie and that is always the highlight of the movie, my mother, for me, because she's just so funny. And when I asked her, first of all, big shock for me and my sister, we found out why. This is the first time we ever asked her, why did dad quit going to church? Because of birth control. We thought they weren't doing it anyway. We didn't think that was an issue. But when she basically said, yeah, we didn't think we needed to tell you, and we thought some structure was better than none, I thought that was very telling of the thought process of that era, that no structure was just not to be considered. She was certainly not a Catholic, although she pretended to take Catholic lessons. This was 1951, so she could marry my father. But, yeah, just you needed some some religion in your life. That was what I took away from that one. I don't believe him, and that's not good, but it's better than nothing. And that's so different than what we were saying, which is certainly not better than nothing. Nothing better. That's still a very common notion. But it was funny just to realize that you hadn't figured out that she wasn't going to church with you for a reason. It was like a kind of a family secret that wasn't even the open, but you hadn't even noticed that it was a phenomenon so telling of why kids put up with anything in childhood, because whatever, you're so young, you have nothing to compare it to, so whatever is the norm, you just think for you, that's normal. And that's why kids don't report abuse and a thousand other things, because it's just always gone on. I just never thought about it. Mom never went to church. She stayed home. My sister and my father and I went, and that was it. And then it just came up in conversation one Christmas when I was 13. And because I'm Jewish, well, that does explain a lot. So, Larry, what about your background? Do you have a religious indoctrination you're repelling? I think what Bill said, first of all, is really important because I think you see a lot of adults today who are very bright, very intelligent, very rational people, but they cling to this crazy idea because they have been indoctrinated as children. And even though it doesn't make sense to their adult self, that childhood part of their brain clings to this idea of God. And somehow there being some order, it's very, very hard to let go of. My parents were a secular Jews. I grew up in Brighton Beach and was sent to the local Hebrew school which happened to be a very Orthodox Hebrew school. So I was immersed with these very Orthodox rabbis who were like mean, like nuns hitting you and shutting down any discussions and punishing you and sending you into the big dark temple to sit by yourself and think about what you had done. So I kind of was really into the ritual and the darkness and the weirdness of it. But I also knew right off the bat very early on during the bar mitzvah lessons that it was kind of nonsense and it was kind of ridiculous. And I was into it on one level and I was also kind of stepping out of it. And by the time the bar mitzvah comes along and my father would constantly remind my father had a lot of very reductionist philosophies of life like do unto others and then split. That was one of his favorites. And he said, do the bar mitzvah and get the checks. Like that was his thing about the bar mitzvah. There was no spiritual dimension to it, right? So, like a lot of kids, we did the bar mitzvah, we got the checks. And I never went back into the temple after that. And most of my friends never went back either. Now, I notice in adulthood that a lot of people are sort of starting to drift back because I think we were talking about a little bit about getting older, and the fear starts to set in, and I see people starting to drift back in in a kind of way that they feel comfortable with, but still drifting back to the things that they rejected in religion. Sometimes these are the same people who start watching Fox News when they get into their sixty s. I haven't noticed that phenomenon. Really? Oh, I have. I could name names. Some you would recognize because they're famous people who I knew 1520 years ago as Hollywood liberals. Hadn't seen them in a long time, talked to them. Number one person actor, you'd know who it was and was telling me a couple of years ago not only did Obama ruin America, he did it on purpose. I'm like what? I thought you were blank. Blank. All I could think is, yeah, he started watching Fox News that happens. That's a thing for people of a certain age, people looking for comfort in some way. And those are the things that give people comfort because they give you answers. Even though you may know on some level they're false answers, it's still answers and it helps you sort of move on, I guess. It's interesting to think about how the landscape has changed in the intervening years. I think it was changing incrementally, as you point out in that poll result, that it seemed like secularism was winning some steady gains. That atheism was far more public. And I was getting the sense that people were more visibly embarrassed by you weren't meeting the same kind of bible thumper and then we were making clear gains politically on things like gay marriage. It was unthinkable. We had a brief moment of it in California, then it got rolled back and then all of a sudden it was the law of the land in like 15 minutes and you got the sense that even fundamentalist Christians weren't poised to fight that particular culture war issue again. And then Trump happened and it's like religion is just kind of a variable we don't even have to talk about and yet quietly behind the scenes, religious fundamentalists are getting a lot of what they want out of Trump and it's, it's like it's off, you know, it's off my radar. I'm not spending time talking about Christian theocracy. Occasionally I'll hit the topic of Islam when something blows up, but it's kind of all Trump all the time. And yet out of the corner of my eye I'm seeing the stealth theocrats in the US just quietly kind of build their kingdom in in a larger sense we are becoming my analogy would be Saddam under Iraq where a minority was ruling over a majority. The majority of this country is liberal but because it's rigged, it actually is on their part with the electoral College, with gerrymandering, with voter suppression. I mean, look at the Supreme Court as we see this play out in these weeks. The Supreme Court should be seven liberals because two people were appointed under George Bush who did not win the popular vote. Exactly. People forget that and now Trump has gotten two. So if the right person, if we had direct election, which we should, and the will of the people had put Al Gore and Hillary Clinton into office, the Supreme Court wouldn't even be in question. So in that sense, yes, you're right. The right wing and the evangelicals have enormous power, but they are a minority who are now this is very dangerous for America as it was a seething Pot under Saddam and Iraq you had two thirds of the country who were Shiites ruled over by a third Sunnis. And we're like a two thirds liberal country that's now going to be ruled what we are. We own nothing power wise by this minority right wing base. And. They are your right getting everything they want. I think, if I may, I think there's like two forces at work. Also to me, it seemed like from the day that Obama was inaugurated, the hate began to build and the backlash was just it was going to erupt in some way. And I think trump is that eruption to some degree. I think also the evangelicals in the christian right made a conscious decision somewhere along the line that they're tired of losing and they want to win and they will win at any cost, and they're willing to abandon all of their morality, their false morality, to win, and that's what they've done and they've won. So I agree with Bill. I think this minority has kind of amassed itself and organized itself in such a way to really, as you called it before, a kind of a slow coup. Yeah, they keep their eye on the ball. They know how to organize on the local level, which they have done. They had a plan from 30 years ago to put this guy in the supreme court, the heritage foundation. They groom these people. They put them up through the system. They clerk for other judges. They know exactly what they're doing from the beginning. Well, what are the liberals doing? We're having a big gathering. Okay? We gathered. We got our pussy hats on. We don't do that nuts and bolt stuff. We got to learn how to do that better if there's time, because it may be over now. I mean, we may never get it back. Power begets power, as we see with kavanaugh probably going on the court. How long is that going to last? For a long time. Yeah. It's a real concern that the left has pendulum swung into identity politics and its own kind of almost theocratic sensoriousness around speech and white privilege and male privilege. And it's not to say those things don't exist and they're obviously appropriate targets of outrage with respect to every one of those variables. But it is liberal outrage now or leftist outrage now is such a blunt tool that is hitting everything with the same force. You can see how that it's just if you call enough non racist, racist enough, at a certain point they're going to say, well, fuck you, I'm going to vote for trump too. It's like you're not my party anymore. And also, if I may, as bill pointed out, I mean, we don't need to worry about Russian meddling. They have meddled with the elections all these years, using the supreme court, the gerrymandering, all these different things were used. The electoral college to guarantee the republicans would have a larger percentage of the voters than they really earned. So I think the system is so broken, it seems like who's going to fix that? Just if ex felons could have voted yes in Florida, it would be a blue state. Yeah. The one thing republicans are creative about is cheating, their geniuses at cheating. If they channeled any of that creative energy into anything else, they could fix all the problems in the world. But they're brilliant at it. Like the way they chipped away at abortion rights. Who would have thought some of these things? You can't have abortion here unless the hallways are 8ft wide. And those kind of laws that they're always thinking up, all the environmental regulations pulled back. Pruitt's gone. You see, the thing is Pruitt's gone, but the environmental regulations keep on getting pulled back. We had this big moment of upset about the children being put in the detention centers. It's going on every single day since then, you know what I mean? In large numbers. So it's overwhelming. And again, I think this is why people are looking for some kind of a simple, comfortable answer and why people retreat into simpler solutions to the problem instead of facing the fact that it's kind of out of control. Before I feel the tractor beam of current events pulling us off the topic of religious, I want to go there. I wanted to say one thing to your last question about you said in the last ten years, things have changed a lot. And I always make the joke when people say religious, and I take all the credit, but I know it's really not because of religious. It may have had a nice little moment. I think the big thing that made the difference in the last ten years is Google. Mitt Romney used to come to your house with a pamphlet. That's as much as you could find out about Mormonism. And it sounded pretty good in the pamphlet. Scientology is a perfect example. You'd be in the religion ten years before you found out about the nutty creation. Zenu, right? Didn't you have to get to like, level six or something? Well, that's the amazing Paul Hage story. Not to derail you, but do you know the Paul Hagas story? I think it was in Lawrence Wright's book. Going clear. Yeah, I mean, he was in like, whatever, 20 years, and they finally give him the secret teachings. He has to take a briefcase to essentially like a bank vault and contemplate them in solitude. And it's all that just 70 trillion years ago, they're brought here on something that was battled with DC Eight and thrown into volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs. And his summary of it was that he thought he was being given an insanity test. He didn't know whether or not he should just laugh and then pass the test or accept this. But that was what I'm saying, is that you can look that up now. It's all over the internet. And at a certain point it wasn't. And Mormonism is just as lacking. But they'll still deny it. I mean, the Mormons will still deny that there's secret handshakes to get into heaven. The Scientologists will definitely deny what was great. In religious is, we were able to find clips like promotional footage that they shot, animated pieces that sort of tell the origin myths mormonism and Scientology. And they were like Saturday morning cartoons, but they were real and those were very telling. I thought they were great. And they were hilarious. Hilarious. Because here they are as it is. It's like we don't have to play with that at all. How do you actually accomplish that as a director? Do you just you have some researcher who is just scouring the world? I tend to myself generate a lot of the clip thoughts because I'm thinking all throughout what movies might be funny to draw on, what stuff we might need. And then, yeah, I have great researchers who go out and find those clips, get permission to use them, which is very tricky. We had all these Middle Eastern clips from various terrorist organizations. It's very hard to get permission to use those things. It's tricky, but that's how you do it. Yeah. That's a laborious process. And that's one of the things that makes the film so much different than just the normal, uncomfortable interview. You can just sprinkle it with hilarity more or less on demand. Is there anything either of you would do differently or that you regret? Or is there any place where you felt like you don't? Because one thing I feel don't go there. I always regret. You just can't. I don't know. Both of us could watch that movie and imagine doing the entire movie over from beginning to end. We could do another version of it today. It's the kind of thing where that's what happens then, right? The old thing art is never finished, just abandoned. We abandoned it at some point. And I'm so glad people still like it and I still like it, but I can't watch it without thinking, yeah, I could have been more eloquent there. Or I could have thought of three other better examples or, I don't know, getting up in the morning. Sam, it was not there had to be some gentleman there. I am in Maguito at 08:00 A.m. Talking about the apocalypse. Right? Well, the Jesus land. I forget what it's called. Holy Land. Holy Land Amusement park. You know, Disneyland for religious sadist. I mean I mean, the crucifixion scene in there was insane. I still can't believe that. Does it still exist, do you think? Holy Land? Definitely. Yeah. And not only is it crazy, but it's like three times a day crazy. They do the show like the Disneyland shows over and over and over all day long. I love that Jesus. I hope he's getting paid well because he's earning his money. Lebowski. Jesus, like the lebowski? Yes. He was the dude. Yeah, he was perfect. But he was also a legit believer who wanted to argue with you. He came up with the best analogy of the best theologian. You went up against yeah, that's true. But you know something? That's one of the great things about Bill also, if I may tip my hat further, he's a great listener, and he is not, as much as it might seem like he's got an agenda. He's very open minded, and when people make good points all along the way in religious, when people make good points, he acknowledged that. He's not trying to trip them up, he's letting them speak. And when they speak intelligently, he acknowledges that. I mean, the trucker scene, that one trucker walks out, in the beginning, we thought he might be he was a big guy about to kill me, but luckily he went the other way, out the door. But the other guys and I wound up being very friendly, and they prayed for me at the end, and I mean, it was actually kind of sweet. Yes, exactly. Would you find yourself on camera going further in an adversarial direction than you would if the camera wasn't rolling? Like, if you were just in a social situation with these people and the topic of religion came up, do you think that you would agree to disagree much earlier or or because, I mean, I find myself at dinner parties, you know, you know, rarely, but now but, you know, it was more true ten years ago. But, I mean, I've had some you know, I've gone to the mat with some people in just purely social situations, just because what they're saying is dumb enough and strident enough that it just seems like, all right, this is a good time to dig in on this topic. But I could imagine if this was being captured for a documentary, I might want to go further. Because, listen, this is the war of ideas that's going to go public. I'm just wondering if you notice a difference between your on camera self and your off camera self in these kinds of conversations. Well, the good thing about me is really the same thing as the bad thing about me. I'm not really any different. I would agree with that. I don't think you feel pressure to perform once the cameras were who are you? Yeah. Especially in that kind of movie, in that kind of setting, and I'd rather let the comedy speak for itself. I was doing a bit at the end of my show Friday night to really at the end, I plugged this because it was my tribute on Real Time for the 10th anniversary, and April Ryan was on the panel, and it came up before we even got to the end of the show, something about religion. And I said to her, you are not going to like this end of the show. And I could tell she's probably someone who goes to church every Sunday, and she does not want to hear Jesus insulted. And I was afraid she was going to, like, really not have a good time or say something even during the editorial, and she wound up laughing so hard. We have cutaways of her. And to me that is the greatest thing about humor, is that laughter is involuntary. You cannot help it. And when it comes out that way, it must in some way say to your brain, there's some truth there, because I laughed at that. It must be a little ridiculous. Yes. Because me, this religious person on the paddle who doesn't really think that way, still laughed. So that's how I hope our message somehow got through to people who otherwise would not have appreciated. And I have found out to be, by the way, I just don't go to dinner parties anymore. That would be my experience. But I have found also in my travels that people religious, even people who are religious people, as long as they have a sense of humor, they love the movie. Yes. I have never met anybody who had a sense of humor who didn't like that movie. I mean, it's a very pleasing movie in that respect and it's about the subject that they are interested in. That's right. That helps. Yeah. Was there any situation that you got into that beyond the one trucker who exited in something that looked like it was approaching real anger? Was there anything that seemed dangerous or sketchy because you were in the Middle East when you went to the Alok San mosque? As far as it was on camera? That's totally fine. No, we got thrown out of so many places. I mean, you see it in the Morbid Temple and you see the lady. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org. You./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking again with the great Douglas Murray. Douglas is an associate editor at The Spectator, and he writes for many other publications, including The Sunday Times, Standpoint, and The Wall Street Journal. He's given talks at the British and European Parliaments, as well as at the White House. He is a truly inspired debater. I've never had the pleasure of being on a debate stage with him, but it would be an honor. And he is the author of a wonderful new book which we discussed in the last podcast titled The Strange Death of Europe Immigration, Identity, Islam. And at the outset of this podcast, I wound up addressing what is currently the most popular question on my Ask Me Anything page. I was going to save that for my next AMA episode, but it just made more sense to work through it here with Douglas. So here's the question what are your thoughts regarding the Charlottesville incident? Please address the many aspects I e. The rioting, the media coverage, the individual groups present, antifa BLM, Trump statements, et cetera. So Douglas and I get fairly deep into that and to related topics like identity politics, guilt by association. And then we finally move on to the topics that have been left out of our prior discussion of his book, topics such as the source of Western values, the problem of finding meaning in a secular world, and related issues. Douglas is really one of my favorite people to speak with, and he's doing very courageous work on the topic of Islam and Islamism in particular. Like many people doing that work, he is often unfairly maligned. But he really is one of the most thoughtful people you could ever hope to meet. So it is indeed a great pleasure to once again bring you Douglas Murray. I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure, Sam. So we were all set to talk about questions of human values and their link to tradition. I think we were going to kind of stumble upon the glories of the Sistine Chapel, having already talked about Islam and immigration and all of that terrorism, et cetera, to our heart's content and to the laceration of our audience. But now we have some major news events threatening to derail us. We have neo Nazis marching and committing murders in Charlottesville. We have another terrorist atrocity in Europe, this time in Barcelona. And then I think just in the last hour or so, there are reports from Finland of a stabbing. Maybe you have more information than I do. You're you're in the time zone. It just doesn't stop. Douglas no, it doesn't. It just goes on and on. And as we've said before, I mean, the thing is that some of the facts vary, but, I mean, not very much. And it's sort of hard to ever find anything new to say about it, although sometimes new people discover the facts about it and get new opinions. But there's not much variation in all this, as you know. Yeah, I think there's some new ground to COVID with respect to Charlottesville, and I think having you on the podcast for this could be perfect. Although obviously we didn't plan to talk about this. But let's start with Charlottesville and Trump and the heat he's getting for his response to it, because I'm in hot water here with at least the moral imbecile wing of my audience. For a tweet I sent out right after Charlottesville, I wrote, quoting myself now on Twitter in 2017, all identity politics is detestable. But surely white identity politics is the most detestable of all. Seeing the absolutely cretinous response to that, I added, the necessary context, of course, is the last 200 years of human history. So I think it's perfect to debrief with you over this, because your bona fide is, as someone who is worrying about immigration, are impeccable, obviously, and there's no doubt there are people in the world or even in our audience who worry that you may be a white supremacist or be motivated by racism. So I want to kind of walk through this, and if there's any point where you disagree, I'll be very interested to hear it. But let me just clarify what I was saying about identity politics here, because the point strikes me as absolutely obvious. But given the response, it's clearly not obvious to some people. Just to give you the predictable response, I've been accused of virtue signaling in the most abject way. This is kind of reverse racism. So racism against white people is okay, or you can only be racist if you're white. I hate white people. Something in that genre just came to me in Torrance, so let me just clarify this and then see if you disagree. So just as not all religions are the same, I have much more to say against Islam than I have against Anglicanism, though I can find something to say about Anglicanism, and I have much less to say against Buddhism. I think there are wonderful things in Buddhism, although I have negative things to say about it as a religion, there are differences here, and so, too, with identity politics. Not all identity politics are the same, and they're certainly not the same with respect to the context in which they're being practiced in history. If you were practicing German identity politics in London in 1950, well, then you deserve to have the shit kicked out of you, right? The same could be true for Japanese identity politics in Nun King. And if you compare that to black identity politics in Alabama in 1964, which I think most sane people would acknowledge was not only morally understandable, but morally and politically necessary, right? That is identity politics, aka the civil rights movement in America. Now, my tweet was actually fairly carefully written. It starts with in 2017, all identity politics is detestable. And of course I'm thinking about the west and I'm thinking primarily about America. I was commenting on Charlottesville, and I believe this. I think Black Lives Matter is a dangerous and divisive and retrograde movement and it is a dishonest movement. I mean, it's not to say that everyone associated with it is dishonest, but I find very little to recommend in what I've seen from Black Lives Matter. I think it is the wrong move for African Americans to be organizing around the variable of race. Now, it's obviously the wrong move. It's obviously destructive to civil society. But let me just say that black identity politics in the US in 2017 is still totally understandable. I think it's misguided, but I think it's completely understandable and in certain local cases, perhaps even defensible. What is not understandable, generally speaking, is white identity politics in the US. In 2017. I mean, you've got pampered doeboys like Richard Spencer who have never been the victim of anything except now the consequences of his own stupidity, and now he gets punched as a Nazi because people mistake him for a Nazi, although he doesn't think he's a Nazi and perhaps he isn't a Nazi. But you have white nationalists and white supremacists marching in the company of actual Nazis and members of the KKK, and that is aligning themselves with people who actually celebrate Adolf Hitler and the murder of millions of people, right? So this is not the same thing as Black Labs Matter, and it's not the same thing as even antifa, these goons who attack them and perhaps got attacked in turn. It's hard to sort out who started it there. And I've got nothing good to say about antifa. These people have been attacking people all over the country and they're responsible for a lot of violence. I think it's a dangerous organization, but it doesn't have the same genocidal ideology of actual Nazis, right? So you have to make distinctions here and all identity politics is not the same. So I guess I'm just wondering, do you disagree with any of that? I think I have a slightly different take on it. I agree with most of what you just said. I think there are several things. One is that I think it's inevitable that if identity politics runs riot and rampant among one group of people, it's almost always going to cause a counter force. In my latest book in the Strange Death of Europe I mentioned how it's quite hard to see how you don't get nasty white identity politics at some stage as a response to nasty identity politics of other kinds. Or in other words I think as I say at one point it's not in the long term sustainable. Everyone's allowed to do it on the basis of their skin pigmentation apart from people of one skin pigmentation. It's just hard to imagine how that would be sustainable in the long term. Although I agree with you there are ebbs and flows in history of when you would legitimately have a cause among one group and then it would diminish and so on. And I think there are two other things. One is that it's very hard once you go down this route to know when to stop and it's not just a personal judgment is it because it relies on the goodwill of everybody else from your background or of the same skin pigmentation. I mean it means that you you're not going to have an opportunist on your side. Well we all know human nature. You always have hucksters and you always have opportunists and you always have people who as I often say remain on the barricades even after the battle is won because they don't have a home to go to other than the barricades. And that phenomenon is going to happen and I think it's been happening in a whole set of rights claims in recent years. I agree with you. I mean I can't see why somebody like Richard Spencer could ever be regarded as having a sort of as you say legitimate grievance as it were. Not that there's any legitimate grievance that could permit somebody going down into those fetted byways anyway. But I disagree that it's not possible that as it were a white person somewhere in the states or some people might be feeling some aggravation and I don't again I'm talking this much like you in the issue of context to do with particular groups at this moment in time. And let me throw out the obvious one. I can see how a white American in a former steel town without a job and with all the same sort of lack of prospects as people of other skin colors in the area and so on. Also on top of all of that has to endlessly hear from the media and from a lot of rich kids at universities the claim that he has got white privilege and him feeling particularly at this moment in time particularly disgruntled about that. Now as I say all of this to my mind it's just horrible horrible train which I just wish we weren't collectively stuck on. I mean of course we're agreed on that. It's sort of too obvious to say but but I say it because I have to say as an outsider looking at America it does seem to me that you're driving yourselves mad at the moment. And one of the ways in which you're driving yourselves mad is in this way in which you went towards something which I thought was the purpose and the dream within America, the dream after the civil rights achievements and so on, which now seems to me to be being thrown away and almost bungee jump going back from after the moment of progress. And I think that this is happening because people are going down the whole avenue of this identity politics in general. I see it everywhere in the States, on everything. And I've never heard the only one I can claim to have any legitimate kind of personal insight into is the sort of gay identity politics thing. I've never seen people at such a pitch of illegitimate agitation, and I don't know why they're doing it. Again, I fully agree. And this is why I would say that all identity politics is toxic at this point. Now, again, there are local cases where this almost certainly isn't true. If you're going to tell me that the Rohingya Muslims need to practice some identity politics against the murderous Buddhist and Myanmar, okay, fine, I'll sign that waiver. But generally speaking, in developed societies where civil society is or was well established, where you have norms of kind of universal political argumentation, where the color of your skin is irrelevant to the position you are arguing for or should be, must be to be persuasive, identity politics is a disaster. And yes, as you say, the light was just fully visible at the end of the tunnel here, and we had a two term black president. If we can't secure that as a durable gain for civil rights, what the hell is going on? Right. Exactly. And this Secretary of State and so on. But I think this thing about is it worth it's not just about where you individually or I individually or any other individual holds it. It's the fact that there are always going to be people who, for short term political gain, do not want to exercise the same standards. There will always be somebody who wants to who feels that they haven't had a fair enough, you know, go at things and or they just want more, or they want to be famous or they want to be rich or something. They want to lead a crowd, and and they will claim that it doesn't matter that, you know, we've had a two term black president. The whole country is still institutionally racist, and we're only minutes away from slavery. Again, there's always going to be a there's always going to be a reward for those people, it seems to me, in the situation that we are or you are in America setting up for yourselves. Yeah, let me just again reiterate that I agree with you that in certain cases, even white identity politics is understandable. Here again, if you're talking about people who have been kind of passed over by the new economy and are, in addition to finding it difficult to get a job, they're being told that it's good, that it's more difficult for white people, given the history of racism, and then they have to confront the reality of immigration. Taking some jobs, say, so, yes, that's understandable. But again, that doesn't map on to Richard Spencer, right? No. And I wouldn't want that person to go remotely near white identity politics as a response. It seems to me more likely that people are going to be pushed in such a direction if you sustain for too long. The idea is, I say, that everyone has that right. Other than them, of course. And that's what I see happening. By the way, just a thought. All these things, the context of these things in a way reminds me of that really interesting thing some years ago. Our mutual friend, I think I can say friend, certainly in your case, certainly I admire very much Richard Dawkins some years ago, do you remember in an interview talking about children? We didn't want people to be called Christian children. They're just the children of Christian parents and so on. Your listeners will probably be very familiar with this point. There was this really interesting point when Richard in one interview said there's no such thing as a Christian child. There's no such thing as a Muslim child. And then he stopped himself. He stopped himself because he was about to say something he knew he didn't want to say, and he acknowledged it. I don't want to say there's no such thing as a Jewish child. Now, why do you not want to say it? Because of the echoes we all know about this. And this is just that is a horrible thing. And he knew it and he pointed to it. It was fascinating. And that's the same, it seems to me slightly with what's going on with the identity politics thing. We are tolerant of the black identity politics because we recognize that within living memory, the black communities, particularly in America, had legitimate grievances and legitimate cause to have an identity that they marched on, as it were. And we're also aware that in living memory there were white people in the south who lynched people because of the color of their skin, as I said. So what we're doing is getting around and coping with the sharp corners of not that distant history. The thing I think that's so worrying about it, though, as I say, is that I hear almost nothing of mending. This I see only, and I hear only in America, people staking their careers and their livelihoods and their entire occupations are making this worse. People claiming it's never been so bad, people setting up their own stalls in the identity marketplace. Maybe, as I say, maybe it's just nature of the media and of people becoming well known because they make the most outrageous statement or whatever, but I just am not hearing in America anything to do with the sort of spirit of mending. And this worries me. Yeah, well, I think one way to mend it is to make the kinds of distinctions we're making now. It's relevant that within living memory, as you say, these kinds of atrocities and injustices were commonplace, as you and I point out ad nauseam. It is relevant when you talk about Islam at this moment. It is relevant what is happening not only in living memory but in in, you know, our working memory entered consciousness 2 seconds ago with respect to the news and to not move in the next sentence to some statement of moral equivalence with respect to the Crusades. So context matters here, and perhaps I don't need to belabor this, but I stand by this tweet. I think if you can't differentiate the identity politics of black people in America from the white supremacist identity politics we're seeing given voice in Charlottesville, you've got some moral calibration problems on your hands. That's not to say that some form of white backlash against the rampant identity politics we're seeing practiced in America isn't to be expected or understandable in certain cases. I know. I just look at all this with such horror because I genuinely have thought for most of my life that we were getting beyond this. And I sort of still think we are. I just think, as I say, that the standards that we might wish to apply there will always be people whose careers are predicated on not applying them. I mean, in my country, in Britain, we had this long business with the Cecil Road statues a couple of years ago, the roads must fall thing. But that whole thing really was whipped up by some South African students who happened to be road scholars who were basically appealing to an audience back home in South Africa and were going to make careers when they went back. There are always going to be people who are going to do that and are going to take advantage. Look at one other, by the way, a little hobby horse of mine, this Anne Frank Center in America. It's called Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect and Tolerance or something. It's run by a couple of just activist Democrats who are standing on the name of a murdered Jewish girl who they never had met or had any connection to and using this dead Jewish girl to attack Republican politicians they don't like. I myself think it's it's just grotesque beyond words. I think if they had any shame, they would stop, but they don't. They were furthering their careers. They're really keen on it. They ran some kind of gay rights group and then they obviously realized there wasn't such a running and so much fuel in that, maybe. And then they just decided to, as I say, grab a dead Jewish girl and run with using her name. And I just think this is from every community and every background and every skin color and everything. You're always going to have these people who just don't want to exercise the standards because they need not to. And there's also just an impressive degree of confusion here. People just can't follow the plot. So you have something like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which in the face of a Nazi rally in Charlottesville, seems like an absolutely necessary institution. This is what the Southern Poverty Law Center is for to combat this kind of white extremism in the country. But in the same period, they have listed our friend and colleague Maja Nawaz as an anti Muslim extremist. And as much as we've gotten the word out about that, you still have people like Tim Cook, the head of Apple, giving a million dollars to the SPLC in recent weeks. People can't cohere in a vision of what makes sense morally and politically because this identity politics and political correctness has just kind of cleaved our conversation about current events in ways that are just confusing to people. And the response to Trump in the aftermath of Charlottesville or the response to Trump's response, has been emblematic of this. So, for instance, I despise Trump as deeply and as broadly as I think any person I can think of. I mean, I just think he is a conscienceless monster. And, you know, I don't need to go into that at length. I probably have 15 or 20 hours on this podcast of me railing against Trump, but leave it to the left to attack him in ways that make him look nuanced and judicious in the aftermath of this thing. It's unbelievable how bad the commentary has been. Perhaps we can parse this and before we get off Charlottesville because I think it's important. So the first point to make is that Trump failed what, as many people have said is perhaps the easiest test of moral leadership the US. President can ever face, which is to condemn Nazis in our own society, right? That didn't happen early and it didn't even happen to a satisfactory degree late. He just has never managed to articulate what is wrong with a full embrace of the public square by Nazis and armed KKK members. I mean, we had people marching with military rifles in a US city, intimidating people. And in the context of this march, someone gets murdered in what I'm sure will prove to be an actual act of terrorism. Which is to say that the person who did it wasn't mentally ill, but was actually ideologically motivated by his beliefs as we know white supremacist beliefs. I don't think we know that yet. Perhaps that's been discussed in the news and I'm unaware of it. But it's absolutely the easiest possible thing for a sane and ethical U. S. President to get up and condemn this in the strongest possible terms and he didn't do that. So that's what people are appropriately reacting to. And in addition, there's the fact that because he's been so bad on this issue and because he flirted with these people throughout the campaign and in the last six months, and because he's managed to give white supremacists in our society the impression that he's on their side or at least giving them cover or winking at them in some sense, just he is, in some sense culpable for the brazenness of this emergence of white supremacy in recent weeks. That's one point. But what the left is also doing in response to his failure here is they're castigating him for things that actually are true and make sense, and there's no distinction here. They're castigating him to the same degree for points like that. Antifa were also violent, right? And they're also a dangerous organization and it's also despicable to have them attacking in many cases perhaps across the board, but at least in some cases were actually peaceful marchers who just happened to be Nazis, right? But if you're a Nazi who's marching peacefully and get attacked by antifa goons, well, then your violence is actually in self defense in that case, right. It is a morally ambiguous situation when you have these two groups in the public square, and yet he's getting savaged for making that point as much as any other point he did or didn't make. The other, the other thing about Trump is that is that he, as he always does, his narcissism and self regard bled through even in the moment of commenting on this political emergency. And so when he mentioned the mother of the slain woman and talked about how she sent him such a nice message on social media and how he appreciated that, it was so dripping with the focus on himself that it was just appalling. So virtually everything was wrong with how he handled that news conference. And yet the left still manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by focusing on the few points he was making that were in fact legitimate or at least potentially legitimate, unless we can learn to talk about these things in an honest way. What's happened now is the response to Trump's failure has been so uncritical of with respect to these issues that the left has managed to say all of the things that make it seem like just a purely partisan overreaction to his failure. And so the Republican base or the Trump supporting base now discount everything that's being said about him in the aftermath of Charlottesville. And you have, of course, again, idiots and goons antitrump appearing on all the major television stations in America saying that, yeah, we should bring down the statues of Abraham Lincoln and all the Founding Fathers, and we should also blow up Mount Rushmore. And you get all those people coming out making their short term political opportunity, if I can say so about this. Maybe it's just, as it were more generous in my interpretation of this. I may be wrong in it, but it seems to me there are two bits of the criticism of Trump after Charlottesville. The first was whether some of what he said was wrong or right. And the other one is whether the timing was wrong or right. Now, it seems to me that self evidently the timing was obviously wrong. You don't do a moral equivalence thing after somebody's been killed. You just come out and condemn the people who did the killing and so on. The problem is, I think there is probably a legitimate sense of grievance among some people in America about the fact that in terms of this antifar violence and so on, you're not starting from a level playing field. I mean, the so called antifascists in America are allowed to just go on to campuses and burn them down and smash everything up and still be called antifascists people who are actually the closest thing to fascists until you see the people in Charlottesville. And that doesn't get the condemnation and so on. So I imagine that what Trump was thinking was, I'm not again, I may be being generous, but but my my impression would be that he was thinking I'm not giving them that the so called antifascists are indeed all antifascists and that everyone they call fascists are fascists. But again, this is a breakdown of the terms. This is a result of the overreach. Again, if the Southern Poverty Law Center is allowed to designate churches that don't agree with gay marriage as hate groups, then we're already slipping. If Charles Murray is allowed to be called a fascist and allowed to be drummed off a campus and a female professor he's with assaulted, and it doesn't get any sympathy or care or concern, then we're already slipping down this problem. I'll give you a couple of examples that strike me as fairly egregious, which make your point. And this is I haven't really taken stock of who is guilty here, but they're very prominent people who you and I respect as journalists in every other context. But people tweet photos from DDay saying alt left rioters attacking fascists or something like that, making fun of Trump's point. And so the suggestion is that the people who were the antifa people or whoever they were, who were fighting the Nazis in Charlottesville were the moral equivalent of our soldiers during World War II. It's terrific, isn't it? I mean, it makes you also, by the way, how cheap and easy is it? I mean, the soldiers who stormed the beaches at D Day saw their friends and comrades shot down beside them. A lot of them saw things they'd never forget and went through an unbelievable thing. Every single person there that day had a courage that most people in our generation, thank God, will never have to even try to summon up or imagine. And. Here are these people who just have to tweet, and they make themselves feel like the moral equivalents of those people. Again, I've said enough against Trump to hopefully never be condemned for failing to detect any of his moral or intellectual lapses. But in this case, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and follow you there and imagine that he was just trying to be fairly scrupulous about the blame that existed on both sides. And what a danger. This represents to civil society, where you have people, members of the KKK and neo Nazis marching with a permit, right, which is something our First Amendment protects. And they're getting attacked by the people who show up to protest. Now, I'm sure that ran both ways. Perhaps there were neo Nazis who were doing the attacking first, but still, you can't attack members of the KKK and Nazis just because you don't like them. If you are using force first, you are the criminal in our society. Now, you might want to rewrite those laws. You might decide that that at a certain point, nazis shouldn't be allowed to assemble. You might want to follow Germany and pass laws against Holocaust denial or the display in the swastika. I don't think you do want to do that. I think our First Amendment is the right way to go here. But given the laws and the norms of civil society, you can defend much of what Trump was saying there. What you can't defend is the man and how he has practiced politics up until this point, and the dog whistles he has given to racists for now years. And so the context matters, and that's what's misleading people here. Can I make two points to that? The first is this comes down to a consistency point. This reminds me of a very important issue that has come up in my country all sorts of times. What do you what do you do about a collective group of people or a voluntary organization of people? And where do you draw the line between claiming they're all responsible for something or not? Now, you'll see where I'm going here, but let me give you an example. There's a mosque not far from where I'm presently sitting that's run by, among others, somebody who's a former military commander of Hamas, okay? I would not say that everybody in his mosque was a terrorist or that everybody in his mosque was Hamas, or even that everybody in his mosque was sympathetic to Hamas. I just be very careful about that for all sorts of reasons, some legal, some just practical, and some to do with just not wanting to imply to all sorts of members of the public that that whole place is filled with terrorists because there are consequences potentially of such speed. Now, I would like to think that it was possible to be consistent on that sort of thing. As I understand it, Trump seems to have thought, and I don't know whether this is the case or not, but there was a protest happening, and then the KKK and the others show up and so on. Now, there are lots of other cases of that stop the War Coalition marches, census. You start to Stop the War coalition march, and then some people come along with a load of stuff that hates the Jews. To what extent can you say, okay, everybody on that march hates the Jews? I think you can't. I think you have to say, look, it attracts those sort of people. So what can we infer about your cause, for instance? But I think in order to be in order to try to think our way through this, I think we do need to have some kind of consistency on that approach. And I think that there is a deliberate desire to say in certain directions, actually, I need these people all to be fascists or all to be Nazis. And I reckon I can't foresee a situation where I was on a march and was marching along and a bunch of people with sausages were beside me, and I was okay with that. Okay. But it's the sort of scenario that we've seen, as I say, in similar situations. And one of the big problems in this, it comes back to my point about the so called anti fascists is, as I said many times, they desperately need fascists. And the bar for describing people as fascists is commensurately low as a result. And this comes down to the second point I wanted to make, was that there's a member of the Cabinet here in Britain who I am a great admirer of, called Sajid Javid. He's been in the Cabinet for some years now as a Conservative MP, and he was, among others, among our politicians in Britain who immediately sort of leapt on the Charlottesville thing and made public pronouncements. Now, he said in a tweet, I think it was, look, it's not I'm abbreviating it's not hard. We're against fascists. We support antifascists. I was taught that in school. This sort of niggles at me because I just don't think it's as easy as that. And I think a lot of this is, as I say, short term political opportunism and a desire to, as I say, who doesn't find it easy when the KKK come along to condemn them. I mean, well, it turns out some people do. The President of the United States does. That should be a straightforward the one that concerns me are all the levels beneath that, including people who can just willfully be described as, I don't know, fascist. I've just seen too much of the kind of finger pointing and fascist claiming just vast numbers, it seems to me, of the self described antifascists are just very obviously fascistic. And so I don't see the same simple view of this. I think there are fascists and there are Nazis. I think the KKK fit that Bill and I think the photograph might. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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 adfree and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Jennifer Dowdna. Jennifer is a biochemist. She is a professor in chemistry in the Molecular and Cell biology departments at the University of California at Berkeley. She's also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a researcher in the Molecular, Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is one of the world's experts on RNA, protein, biochemistry, and in particular, CRISPR biology. And she's the author, along with Samuel Sternberg of the book a Crack in creation, gene editing and the unthinkable power to control evolution. And Jennifer is credited as one of the inventors of the CRISPR CAS Nine gene editing technology, which is the topic of today's conversation. We get into all the details and the ethics, and time was short. Jennifer is a rock star scientist, and I could only schedule about an hour with her, but I will take it. It was great to have her walk me through the details of CRISPR, and I trust you will leave this podcast, as I did, knowing much more about where this technology is at present and where it's all likely to head. So without further delay, I bring you Jennifer Dowdna. I am here with Jennifer Dowdna. Jennifer, thanks for coming on the podcast. Great to be here, Sam. So you are a co inventor of CRISPR CAS Nine, which is a gene editing technology that we'll talk about before we get into this, perhaps you can just give a kind of potted summary of your background scientifically. Well, I'm a biochemist, so I'm somebody who studies molecules and how they work. And I've always been interested in evolution and the way that cells have evolved to use their genetic information in precise ways. And that's actually how we got into the whole area of gene editing. And you're at UC Berkeley, right? I'm at UC Berkeley. Correct. Now, I know there is some controversy about who should get credit for inventing CRISPR CAS Nine, and we don't really have to go into that. I think there clearly is no controversy that you are one of the world's experts on this. Is there anything you want to say about the controversy or is it kind of a distraction as far as this conversation is concerned? Well, I guess all I would say is that my work with Emmanuel Sharpentier was going on to really I would call it a curiosity driven project that was aimed at discovering how bacteria fight viral infection. So neither of us were aiming to create a technology. But the work that we did uncovered the activity of a protein that can be programmed to find and cut DNA sequences. And with that understanding, it was pretty obvious that this was going to be a great technology. And that was work that was published in 2012. So I don't think anybody argues about that. Right, okay, well, let's talk about CRISPR and that protein. But before we do, it might be good to give a very quick remedial summary of some basic molecular biology. I think we have a fairly educated audience here, but everyone, I think, can do with a primer on DNA to RNA to protein because we're going to be talking about just the mechanics of gene editing here. So can you give us a few minutes of basic biology here? Sure, absolutely. So I guess we could start by pointing out that people probably are familiar with the idea that DNA encodes genetic information. So it's really the chemical that stores information in cells and allows cells to grow and develop and become tissues or whole organisms. And the way that cells use that information is mostly in the form of proteins. So the information in the DNA is converted into proteins by a process that creates the protein molecules by reading the code in the DNA. And the intermediary in that process is kind of what I like to call a throwaway a copy of the genetic information, which is molecules of RNA. And what has emerged over the last probably two decades is that RNA molecules are not just throw away copies of the genome but they are actually molecules that have a lot of interesting functions in their own right. And that's actually what I've always been interested in in my own laboratory, is the role of RNA molecules that are involved in controlling the flow of genetic information and helping cells decide when and how to use the information that's stored in the genome in the DNA. And the story of CRISPR, the story of this gene editing technology is kind of interesting because it really involves all three of those types of fundamental molecules DNA, RNA and protein because it's a protein that is involved in the is really responsible for cutting DNA in at precise positions. The places in the DNA that get cut are defined by molecules of RNA that the protein, which is called CAS Nine holds onto. And the places in the DNA that get cut are the sites in the genome where editing occurs, where permanent changes are made to the genetic code. And so you discovered this in bacteria, right? CRISPR has been described as part of the bacterial immune system. That's correct. Take me there. So what happens? Viruses periodically infect bacteria. And what does the CRISPR sequence do in that context? Right? So viruses infect bacteria actually all the time in nature. And so bacteria have a very effective way of defending against viruses by storing pieces of viral DNA in their own chromosome. And then they use that stored viral DNA sequence. There are actually multiple sequences coming, one representing each virus that has infected the cell over time. So you can think of it sort of like a genetic vaccination card. And then those stored viral DNA sequences are copied into RNA and then those RNA molecules assemble with the CAS Nine protein to direct it to sequences that match the RNA sequence. In other words, sequences that belong to viruses. And when that match occurs, then the CAS Nine protein works like a molecular scalpel and cuts the viral DNA and basically allows the cell to destroy it. So again, this is semi dense material and you don't have the benefit of visual AIDS here. So I just want to make another pass on this just to make sure everyone has a picture of what's happening here. So you have this little machine, really, it's a combination of protein molecule and RNA which is really informing its behavior. Right? So you have an RNA sequence that matches a sequence in the DNA which determines what part of the DNA it will bind to and edit or cut. And this is something you've discovered in bacteria, but which can be used as a kind of molecular scalpel in eukaryotes like mammals such as ourselves. And this then becomes a way of targeting with a precision that we didn't have before, spots in the human genome that can be edited. You nailed it. That's perfect. Okay, so I guess I'm interested a little more in the mechanics of this. So what are the chances that the CRISPR CAS Nine technology will cut in the wrong place in the genome? Does there have to be a complete complementarity between the RNA and the DNA? Or is there some potential for error here? Sure, there's always potential for error. I think the amazing thing about the CRISPR CAS Nine technology is that it's it's really pretty accurate and it's not perfect, but it's it's it's it's close to. So I think I think what's emerged over the last few years that people have been using this and it's probably worth mentioning that this technology took off incredibly quickly. It was adopted very rapidly after our 2012 publication. And there are now probably thousands of people around the world using this as a tool in all sorts of systems. And the good thing about that, or one of them, is that it's meant that there's been very rapid development of the technology as well as understanding of how it works. And one of the things that's emerged is that this tool is accurate enough to make precise changes in even very large genomes like the human genome or plant plant genomes. And when when people have have sort of, as I think as people have become more sophisticated about using it, ensuring that the, the CAS Nine protein is used in limiting amounts in cells not present in huge quantities and not hanging around for too long, that it's actually remarkably accurate at generating those kinds of edits. It's possible to find off targets, but you have to look pretty hard. And can you edit a single base pair or do you have to deal with longer sequences than that? You can edit a single base pair, yeah. Wow. So you've described this as a scalpel. Now, what happens after the DNA is cut? Is it always a matter of inserting more DNA variant sequence or can you simply cut and remove parts of the DNA? Yes, you can cut and remove or you can cut and replace. The removal part turns out to be easier technically to do than the replacing part, but both are possible. So, again, this is so counterintuitive in ways when you actually picture what's happening here, because anyone who's taken biology in recent memory will know that the genetic material inside our cells is in the nucleus and it's bound very tight, it's just crammed in there. The chromosomes aren't laid out in the pretty way that they are when we picture them in textbooks. And now you've sent CRISPR, this little machine into the cell. We'll talk about how you can target tissues later on, but this goes into the cell and moves all over the genome and is searching for the sequence to which it is the mate and so that it can find the place to cut. How does it search the whole genome? How do you get full coverage of a genome? And how quickly does this happen? If we could take a video camera inside a cell, what would we be seeing there? Well, we've sort of done that, not quite a video camera, but it's been possible to make fluorescently labeled versions of the CAS Nine protein that can be visualized in live cells. So you can basically watch these little dots of light moving around in the nucleus. And when you do that kind of experiment, what emerges is that this is a protein that has very fast kinetics. So it's moving around the nucleus incredibly quickly, much more quickly than what you see for other kinds of proteins that are existing in the nucleus. And what's thought to happen is that this protein is rapidly sampling different sections along the sequence of DNA. And it is quite remarkable to think about it because we're talking about billions of base pairs of DNA in the cell. But, but somehow this, this protein very quickly samples along the, the DNA sequence, looking for a match to the guide RNA sequence. And one thing that's important to keep in mind is that it's not a single protein that would be in the nucleus, but instead many, many copies of this. There might be thousands or tens of thousands of copies that are all searching. And when one finds its target site, then it makes a cut and the edit occurs. Now, are the sequences of DNA unique enough so that we're not getting redundant cuts elsewhere? If you send a ten nucleotide sequence as your kind of search code, are we expecting that to be the only place in the genome that would get modified? Or just by dint of numbers, you're going to be altering something you didn't expect to alter if you do that. Well, in one of those interesting serendipities of science, this CAS nine protein actually uses a 20 nucleotide RNA sequence. So it's 20 letters that it's looking for. 20 letters in a row. And if you do the math, that's just about what you need to uniquely define a sequence in the human genome, for example, good numbers were on our side. Right, let's back up. So now we have a human being who has a variety of genes that are not as perfect as they might be. And we'll talk about the conditions for which we have some understanding of the underlying genetics and what could be modified here. But let's say we know what genes we want to alter. How would we target CRISPR to specific sites in the body? And presumably these insertions would sometimes need to be tissue specific. You wouldn't want to send this everywhere, right? Right. And I think you're putting your finger on what I think is one of the critical challenges for gene editing in the clinic going forward, which is just what you said. How do we deliver these editing molecules into the right cells at the right time? One of the ways that this can be done today is actually by delivering into cells that are temporarily taken out of the body. So, for example, people are working hard on correcting mutations that cause blood disorders because the blood cells can actually be taken out, edited and replaced. So I think that's one strategy that gets around the issue of trying to deliver something like this into specific tissues in a person. That's a much bigger challenge. And why is it a challenge, though? What would be the mechanism? Would you use some viral vector to deliver it if you wanted to get it into every cell in the body, what would be the methodology? Well, that would be hard even using a virus, because viruses tend to target particular kinds of cells. So you might have to use a cocktail of viruses that are able to get into many different types of cells. But I think what is typically envisioned is that you might be able to use viruses that would deliver into specific parts of the body, for example, into the liver or into the brain, and create edits that would alleviate disease in cases where the gene edit is necessary, just in those kinds of cells. And what is the time frame over which this would occur? Again, it will talk about how difficult this might be in practice, but let's say we know the gene we want to edit and we have the way to target the relevant tissue and someone has a disease born of this malfunctioning gene. How quickly would CRISPR change their genome and cancel the disease? Well, in principle, very quickly. I've seen some data in animal models of disease, for example in mice where mice get an injection and within a matter of a couple of days you can start to detect edits in the DNA of the cells that have been targeted in the treatment. So I think the idea in principle, and I think this is something the field is working towards doing, is that gene editing would be a fairly fast kind of treatment. And furthermore, and this is actually very important to appreciate, is that it's a different kind of therapy because it's really a one and done treatment in principle. Right. The idea is you would do this once and then you don't have to do it again. Yeah, I really want to get into the ethics of all of this because that is quite interesting and obviously this worries a lot of people. But before we do so, what are the most plausible if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMA 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm bringing you Nicholas Kristokis. Nicholas is a sociologist and a physician. He directs the human nature lab at Yale University, where he is appointed as the Song Goldman family professor of social and natural science. And he's the co director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His lab focuses on the relationship between social networks and wellbeing, and his research engages two types of phenomena the social, mathematical and biological rules governing how social networks form. This is referred to as connection in his work and the biological and social implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and this is often referred to as contagion. His lab also does experiments on how to change population level behavior related to health and cooperation and economic development. So it's very interesting work, and I would have wanted to speak with Nicholas anyway about his work. But another thing that reminded me of the need to speak with him was his experience at Yale, which you may have seen on YouTube, and you should watch it now if you haven't. But he was the professor a while back who was standing before a howling mob of students and stood there with the imperturbability of a saint, really, as he was casticated by young men and women who were properly unhinged by their identity politics and some of the crazy ideas about speech that are rattling around in their heads. I'll embed a relevant clip on my blog. There are many, but I'll have one there where this podcast is embedded. And you will enjoy the first hour of this conversation much more if you've seen five minutes at least of that encounter. Because you will see Nicholas's patience. You will see the untenability of the situation he was in. You will see a hostility to dialogue among Yale students that one could scarcely imagine possible. And this was, I believe, the first incident like this to come to national attention. This preceded the riots at Berkeley preventing Milo's speech, and it preceded Brett Weinstein's ordeal at Evergreen, and it preceded the attack upon Charles Murray at Middlebury. So this was, if not the first moment like this, the first that became very prominent in recent memory. It makes for very interesting viewing. So Nicholas and I talk about all that, and then we get into the dynamics of mob behavior and moral panic and related issues. And I think you'll find it an interesting and useful and certainly timely conversation. So now, without further delay, I give you Nicholas Kristakis. I am here with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Sam. So we met at the Ted conference, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think we've met since. I think that was in 2010. And if I recall, you gave the talk right after mine. Or maybe it was just we were rehearsing together or something. But that's the moment I have in my memory where we shook hands and said, hi was at Ted just before or after one of us got off stage. Does that jibe with your memory? We were in the same session, and my memory is that you were sitting next to me as we were watching the speakers, and, you know, Sarah Silverman spoke, I don't know if you remember. And and the and the woman from 10,000 Maniacs who singing I Adore, whose name I'm spacing on, and you spoke. And what I remember of your talk was that remarkable slide. Maybe that was the first time you used it, where you showed side by side photographs of a bunch of women wearing the hadoor and then a bunch of the full burka in the full burka, and then a bunch of women on scantily clad yeah, on a pornography or whatever. And you said, these are very different moral landscapes, and even they looked like landscapes. I remember visually thinking there were these undulating heads in the way it was rendered, your image, and it really got me to thinking. And the topic of moral relativism and moral universalism is an old one, but I don't think the sophistication of thought that we've been bringing to that topic lately has been very strong. Yeah, you made a big impression on me, too. So we're going to talk about your science and some of the science you presented there at Ted and some of the stuff you've done in the intervening years. But first, just tell people what is your background generally, academically and scientifically? Well, I am trained in the natural and the social sciences. I'm a physician, trained as a hospice doctor. So I spent 15 years taking care of people who were dying. My first appointment was at the University of Chicago, and I worked on the South Side of Chicago taking care of primarily indigent patients, although I had a few faculty and sort of more well to do people. And I worked there as a hospice doctor. And then when I moved to Harvard from Chicago in 2001, I was a palliative clinically I was a palliative medicine doctor. So I was trained as a physician, but then also I was trained as a sociologist. And I have a PhD in sociology as well. And most of my career has been devoted to research. So I'm primarily a research scientist and doing work in public health, but and I stopped seeing patients about ten years ago now. So I'm a natural and a social scientist, and increasingly we do a lot of computational science as well. In my lab, we'll talk about the science because obviously what can be known about social networks and group psychology and many of the other topics you touch, you're now touching AI or human interaction with AI. So all of that's very interesting. But I want to start with your immediate background here because this is one reason why many people know of you, and we're eager for you to come on the podcast. You and your wife Erica were really the canaries in the coal mine for some recent moral Panic is the appropriate name we've witnessed on college campuses. You are the man that many of us have seen standing in the quad at Yale, or I assume that was the quad surrounded by a fairly large crowd of increasingly unhinged students. And this was really mesmerizing to watch. I can't imagine it felt the same to be in the middle of it. And I must say you handled yourself as well as I could possibly imagine, and you have been much praised for the way you conducted yourself in that situation. And many professors have since found themselves in similar situations. There was Brett Weinstein at Evergreen recently. So I just want to talk a little bit about your experience at Yale and then move on generically to the problem on college campuses in general, as described by people like Jonathan Height and others, who are focusing on the way in which there's a kind of authoritarianism emerging on the left, really exclusively, that is preventing free speech. And I want to get your sense of what's happening there and how big the problem is, and then we'll move on to the what we can understand scientifically about crowds and social trends. But insofar as you are comfortable talking about it, can you tell me about what happened at Yale? I think I have been devoted to in some ways, I'm a little naive in the sense that I believe in institutions. I'm also skeptical of institutions, and I am worried about institutions, but I also believe in social institutions. And so I've devoted my life to academia and to what I take to be the core commitments of modern American universities, which are envied the world over. And these commitments center around if you look at the motto of Yale, it looks at Veritas. I mean, that's an extraordinary commitment, light and truth. And these institutions are committed to the preservation, production and dissemination of knowledge, and they are guided ostensibly by principles of open expression and reason and debate and sort of liberal commitments to the quality of human beings, their capacity to perfect the world, the knowability of the world. They're, in my view, committed to a kind of belief in the objective nature of reality. And I would strongly defend those principles and have devoted my life to them, and in fact, even in the narrow issue of free expression, have been defending free expression, often for disenfranchised populations, for a very long time. So even before I came to Yale four years ago, I was at Harvard. I my wife and I had taken some unpopular stands defending the free expression of individuals who, you know, were on the side of Black Lives Matter, who were protesting. There was a high school student who had worn a T shirt that says, Jesus was not a homophobe, and we came to his defense. There were some minority students at Harvard who had some concerns about the final clubs at that institution, sort of their kind of like elite fraternities, and they had posted a satirical flyer, and some people were unhappy about that flyer and wanted to squelch the free expression of those students, and we came to their defense. And so we you know, I am committed to this. I have sort of maybe naively bought in hook, line, and sinker to this belief that these institutions of higher learning in our society are important, that they are worthy of protection and respect. And so this is why, when they fail us, I get very sad. I get sad for our society. I get sad for the students, and I get sad for the institutions. I don't want to just keep talking endlessly, but, I mean, there's a parallel set and I'll come back, I think, to your question. There's a parallel set of ideas about universities in our society. If you think about these universities, they are supported by tax dollars and the bequests of primarily wealthy people. And the reason this money is given to these institutions is to further the mission of the preservation, production, and dissemination of knowledge, not to provide faculty with easy lifestyles. I mean, it's a wonderful thing to be a professor. I see it as a calling, but that's not the purpose, right? I mean, the point is that we are supposed to be that place which discovers things, which preserves Sanskrit, which preserves Shakespeare, which preserves antiquities, which preserves mathematical knowledge and scientific knowledge, which produces discoveries. We're supposed to be the place that transmits this to new young people. And that's the role we're supposed to play in society. And we have a deep commitment to light and truth. So I get very upset when fields of inquiry or ideas are prescribed. And I think that we if our ideas are strong, they should win the battle of ideas. If you're so confident in what you have to say, you should be able to defend it. And your approach should not be to silence your opponents. Your approach should be to win the battle of ideas. I'm just going to interrupt you by reminding you of something you wrote which appeared in The New York Times, which I think is the only thing you wrote in the aftermath of what happened at Yale. Addressing it, he wrote here, quoting you, the faculty must cut at the root of a set of ideas that are wholly illiberal. Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative or repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech. I couldn't agree more with that sentiment. And it's amazing to me that this even needs to be said and said as frequently as we now have to say it. How is it that the left and again, I do want to come back to specifically what happened at Yale, because many people just might not be aware of it or have forgotten the details. But how do you think it is that the Left primarily has lost sight of this principle? That the antidote to bad ideas is good ideas and the criticism of bad ideas? Yeah, I think the right and the left take turns in this regard. I mean, let's not forget the history of McCarthyism on campus. Yeah, but we sort of expect the right to get this wrong at the extreme right. I mean, the left is I was talking to some students here recently. They happen to be conservative students. Again, I should say politically, I'm left of center. I mean, I'm very progressive. I have some libertarian ideas, I have some conservative ideas. But mostly, if I've done these surveys, I am significantly left of center politically, overall. Anyway, I was talking to some of these conservative students, and I was about to say it's the left wing that marches in the streets. But that's actually not true. The right wing also marches in the streets at different points in history, in different locations. I think lately it has been the left which has abandoned these principles. And for me, I should say that there are things like free speech or a non corrupt judiciary or a strong defense, which really should be apolitical. And I also think it's tactically idiotic of the left to surrender this free speech. I mean, after all, let's not forget the Berkeley. That's where the modern free speech movement was born, at Berkeley. And that's where you cannot give a talk now without police protection. I don't agree with many of the things that Ben Shapiro espouses, but the idea that $600,000 of police protection would be required for Ben Shapiro to speak on a university campus is preposterous, and it's a waste of money. I mean, I think this is the other thing that I think is astonishing to me is that if we could preserve and cultivate and recommit as a society to principles of open discourse and protest I totally support protest. I support the right of students to protest. I believe that many of the most important movements the civil rights movement, the gay marriage movement, many of these movements which I wholly endorse, the lead has been taken by young people and people protesting in the streets. This is also part of the American tradition, and it deserves respect and cherishing. But you cannot resort to violence or prevent others from speaking. And it's cost ineffective. Like, look at the money. That $600,000 could have been spent on dozens of students going to school for free. When we lose sight of these core liberal commitments, I think we wind up spending money and eventually spilling blood, which is just heartbreaking. So, yeah, I think it's nuts. Or that many of these speakers need protection. We're going to go back to Yale because I have to get there, but I'll just give a little more color to how crazy this has gotten. You sent me an article from The Economist prior to this interview, which I hadn't seen describing recent events at Read College, and it reads like an Onion article. It's just an unbelievable document. I'm going to read a couple of paragraphs here to give people a sense of it, because as much as I've paid attention to this, I was still surprised by these. Yeah, and I'll interrupt you before. He said, there's been a number of examples of almost stereotypical kind of cultural revolution, like almost Maoism, where the far left resorts to eating its own. So with Brett Weinstein, I mean, Brett is a completely progressive individual for his whole life. And Rebecca Tuval, who wrote that piece, she was stunned. And this this professor at Reed who, you know, who I might or might not agree with about a variety of things you'll read. You're about to read the case. I mean, these are so many of these cases which are so hard to understand, and I hope we can talk a little bit about where they might be coming from as well. But go on. Definitely. Okay. So there's this Western sieve course that apparently has been receiving protests, it seems, in every single class at Reed. So that's the set up. And so now, quoting from the article, assistant Professor Lucia Martinez Valdevia, who describes herself as mixed race and queer, asked protesters not to demonstrate during her lecture on Sappho last November. That's already an Onion article. Sappho is a great poet and also a favorite of queer theory as well. I mean, it's interesting. It's not a surprise you'd be lecturing on safo, but still, our poetry on love is unbelievable. But anyway, go on. I'm going to get some hate mail from my reaction to that, but it gets better. Ms. Valdevia said she suffered from post traumatic stress disorder and doubted her ability to deliver the lecture in the face of their opposition. At first, demonstrators announced they would change tactics and sit quietly in the audience wearing black. After her speech, a number of them berated her, bringing her to tears. Demonstrators said that Miss Valdevia was guilty of a variety of offenses. She was a, quote, race trader who upheld white supremacist principles for failing to oppose the humanity syllabus. She was quote, anti black because she appropriated black slang by wearing a T shirt that said Poetry is lit. She was quote an ableist because she believes trigger warnings sometimes diminish sexual trauma. She was also a quote gaslighter for making disadvantaged students doubt their own feelings of oppression. And then this is a quote from her. Now I am intimidated by these students. I'm scared to teach courses on race, gender or sexuality or even texts that bring these issues up in any way. I'm at a loss as how to address this, especially since many of these students don't believe in historicity or objective facts. They denounce the latter as being a tool of white, CIS, hetero patriarchy. So this is just so insane on every level. And this use of the term gaslighting with which I'm familiar, which has been used ever since the film came out, whatever, 60 years ago. But I hadn't heard this being appropriated by the Intersectional Mob. But then I recently watched rewatched part of the video of you talking to students at Yale and I heard one of the students admonish you for gaslighting, which I hadn't caught the first time around. I have to say, Nicholas said video is just astounding to watch. And I can only imagine what it was like to be there, not having yet been schooled in this trend, that this is the sort of thing that has been happening to people. Am I right about that? Were you aware of this happening to anyone else before it happened to you? Or are you the first? I honestly don't know the answer. I don't remember if at the time, because since then there have been so many similar episodes that I don't remember if two years ago I was then aware of other episodes. Part of the problem is here that there is some merit to some of the ideas, the grand philosophical ideas, and in my view, a lot of merit to some of the complaints of the students. And the problem becomes that these things have been so generalized and what Jonathan calls concept creep as well, affects these phenomena. So what do I mean by this? Earlier, you and I talked about a commitment to the idea that there's an objective nature to reality. Now, there is a long philosophical debate about this topic. It's a deep and interesting set of ideas about subjectivity. You know, can we even see the world objectively? Does objective reality even exist? I think it does. But you can make an interesting philosophical argument. What about the notion of so called social construction? The idea that the gender of the scientist or the racist beliefs of the scientist color their objectivity? Of course they do. We have countless examples of this. We know this from research done by historians and others. We know that it's difficult to be an impersonal observer, that every observer is situated somewhere. And I think there's validity to those ideas. Now, I also think there is an out there out there and that it is knowable and that we do our best to understand it. And so when you carry the rejection of objective reality to the extreme that you call it a tool of heteropatriarchy, you really have kind of jumped a shark. You've taken a core idea which says, look, we need to not always believe what we are told or we need to understand how a person's position in society might affect what they see. And we know this affects even ostensibly objective phenomena. We know that scientists, for example, looking so Emily Martin has done some fantastic work which I teach on how scientists looking at cell division or menstruation interpret the biology by virtue of who they are. But then it takes it to such a ridiculous extreme that it becomes absurd. And similarly the notion of cultural appropriation. So the kernel of the idea there is that some communities of people are so denigrated that not only are they, let's say, killed and wiped out, but all of their ideas and culture is stolen from them, is explored. They are effaced and that all that's left is a kind of caricature of who they are. And there is some truth to that too that it's like adding insult to injury. Not only do I engage in genocide, but like, I take all your ideas, your culture as well and don't even credit you. And who am I to do that? The problem is that, again, it's carried to a preposterous extreme so that now the whole history of ideas and of culture, of art and music is endless theft. I mean, it's endless modification and transformation and exchange of ideas and of thoughts and musical and artistic forms and so forth. To then start claiming that, like in the Reed College example, that she couldn't teach these things, she couldn't wear poetry is lit because she's appropriating African American slang is just a crazy caricature of what is otherwise potentially an interesting philosophical idea to discuss. And so I think this is the thing that has made it especially hard for me is that I believe that I have a more than passing understanding of the epistemology here and I have a more than passing sympathy for some of the concerns about that the students have about police brutality, about economic inequality, about racial justice. But I am deeply concerned with the Maoist abandonment of reason and discourse and the kind of dehumanizing atomizing of people. I mean, one of the things that has really just pressed me in the courtyard that day and I wrote a little bit about this in that one other prior I think you're the only second public remarks I'm making about this. The piece in the New York Times there was a young woman who I think was African American and she said to me, very plaintively and it pulled at my heartstrings, she said, you cannot understand our predicament because you are middle aged and white and male. And I said to her that I understood what she was saying but that I nevertheless believed in our common humanity. And I believe that all of us and I still believe this that all of us as human beings can speak to and understand each other, united by our common humanity and that even though I was a different gender and age and skin color than her that I nevertheless could understand her. And that I was interested in making the effort to understand her. And I would hope that she could understand me. And the students adeered at this. And then there was another student, a minority student who later wrote a post in the Yale Daily News where he wrote that he had never been more disappointed in his colleagues than when I was then the titles at the time were that we were the masters of these colleges. Now they were called Head of College. The title has changed. And he said, I'd never been more disappointed when the master made the argument about our common humanity and that his peers jeered. And so I think when so my point is when you abandon the commitment to our common humanity, when you atomize people, when you believe that only certain types of people have authority to use certain types of cultural ideas or tropes you efface for me a fundamental reality of our common humanity and a fundamental tool we can have to interact with Each other. So that professor at Reed, the claim that she can't wear a t shirt that says poetry is is lit is to me is just is preposterous and violates every basic principle. In my view that should animate a civilized society. To use the example of what the young woman said to you in the quad, that amounts to a naked declaration that meaningful communication which I think is really self defeating in the end. So what is your game plan? If you're saying that you can't communicate your grievances to anyone who is not exactly like you, to anyone who doesn't suffer them along with you, what help are you asking? There are other experiences that we all have had with pain and suffering and death and grief. And maybe I've not had exactly the same kind of suffering as you, Sam, but I'm pretty sure you've had some knocks in life. And I'm pretty sure that if we had a drink together and we're talking about a topic that we would find common ground or shared understanding even with dissimilar trajectories through life. Of course one person struggled with poverty as a child. Another person struggled with the divorced parents. Another person, you know, escaped Vietnam on a boat and another person, you know, witnessed violence and another person, you know, they're there gradations and differences, but I believe people can empathize with each other, I hope. But what was so disturbing about that encounter you had was the insistence that none of that is possible and none of that is ethically or politically relevant. And what was in its place was a desire to essentially shame you into silence. And this is again, coming from Yale students, objectively, some of the most privileged people who have ever lived, whatever the color of their skin. This is just undeniable. Again, taking on board everything you just said about who knows what suffering even privileged people have had in their lives. But the idea that these were some of the most aggrieved people on Earth, this was like the wailing of the widows of shrubbernitsa. I mean, it was just it was madness. And so, again, this is I'm speaking as someone who just watched this from outside, who doesn't know these students and hasn't lived with them and dealt with them subsequently. But just to see the breakdown of discourse through the lens of what you experienced there, again, from the outside, was pretty startling. So before we get more into this, and again, we're going to talk about the more general insights we can glean here about crowd dynamics and social contagion and all the rest. But before we do anything else, I want to back up and just remind people how this kicked off at Yale, what happened. You can be as abbreviated as you want, but just describe the sequence of events. Well, I would rather have you describe the sequence of events. Sure. In my recollection, what happened is your wife Erica, who was also a professor at Yale, responded to an email that came out from the school admonishing people to dress in the most tasteful possible and politically correct Halloween costumes. And your wife, Erica, if memory serves, wrote a response to this to the some hundred students who were under her charge in, what was it, their dormitory or their house. Yeah, I think the original email was sent by a person in the dean's office here, a man by the name of Burgewell Howard, who had previously been dean at the Northwestern University. And he had sent the same Halloween costume email there and then sort of decided to resend it five or ten years later at a different university and at a different time. There had been, to my knowledge, no episodes of students wearing blackface at Yale or pushing the boundaries in such an extreme way. But nevertheless, this email was sent out. And actually, in the New York Times the previous month, there had been a whole exchange about this Halloween costume guidance. So in in the in the Zeitgeist, people were talking about how this is getting was getting a little out of hand and seemed a bit silly that universities were providing official guidance on Halloween costumes. I think there were six people who wrote in that article, and five were against Halloween costume guidance, and one was for it. And so there have been a number of emails that had come out at Yale. At this time in the run up. And I think this one that Dean Howard sent was maybe the third and broadest most detailed. It had links to acceptable and unacceptable costumes or recommended and non recommended costumes, and it was coming from a positive intention, and that is to say that, you know, it it's not necessary to set out to cause needless offense. You know, I'm not I think in a free society, we have to tolerate offense, but it's not like I'm interested in deliberately offending people. And we can talk about some examples on college campuses where this can be hard anyway. And what had happened is we had been hearing from the students, and Erica in particular had been hearing from her students that the students felt infantilised by this email. So many of the students were objecting to this that they couldn't believe this. And Erica that day had taught a class this was in late October where the students in the class was about child development. She taught a class about child development. And there was an animated and intellectually rigorous conversation about what stage of development are college students at and are they capable of choosing their own costumes or negotiating among themselves, you know, if they're if they have taken offense, talking to each other and so forth? And because we had more detail than you want, probably, but because earlier in the year so this was in October, in August, I had sent an email to the students, the 400 students in Silaman that summer. There had been the murders in Charleston, where this man, whose name I'm blocking, thank God, who went into the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Mother church in Charleston, and slaughtered nine or ten people at close range who had welcomed him into their midst. So he was white, and the victims were all black and a vile and despicable carnage motivated by racial hatred. And there had been a lot of discourse in the public space that summer, and that was the summer where all the Confederate flags began to finally come down. And I was very concerned about these events, like many people were. And I had organized a series of speakers at Silaman. We had a famous African American historian from MIT who came and spoke about the history of slavery in American institutions. We had some people talking about other aspects of this. We also had booked months earlier, greg Lukianoff, who had come to speak about free speech. There was a series of public speakers. Anyway, I sent an email in August, late August, beginning of September, to the students in the college about the aftermath of Charleston. And I talked about how, as a public health person, one of the things that I found most distressing was that Walmart had stopped selling Confederate flags, but not guns, and that, in my view, this had it backwards, that there was all this focus on symbolism, but not on practical concerns. That really we need to address, let's say, issues of inequality and issues of violence in our society and that these symbolic things, while important, were potentially distracting us. So I had an essay about this, which is, I think, still somewhere online, and it's a couple of pages, and the student feedback was tremendous. Dozens of students wrote to me, and they said, wow, this has got me to think. And it was so interesting. And and the masters at Yale, you know, previously, we hadn't been spoken to in this way, and for me, this was normal. It was like writing an essay, like a thoughtful essay, where you're trying to defend a point of view. And we had done this previously when I had been at Harvard. My wife and I had a similar role there, and we would regularly communicate with our students in this fashion, and some would agree and some wouldn't agree. And, you know, we had debates there about religious symbols in public places and vegetarianism and, you know, could we roast a lamb at Greek Easter in the college courtyard, using university money to purchase the lamb? I mean, you know, they raise interesting sort of questions for the students to debate. Anyway, so we got all this positive feedback for this, and there had been a lot of students complaining about the Halloween costume guidance email, and that was the history and the background. The New York Times article, it was in the public sphere. Yale students thought it was infantilizing. Previously, we had gotten some praise for engaging the students with ideas, and that's what motivated my lovely wife, who has spent her career taking care of battered women and inner city children and homeless substance users. And this has been her life. We're very progressive people got her to send this email, which said, do you students and the email, just to clarify my wife's argument, was not actually taking a stand one way or the other on whether the guidance was necessary. And one way or the other on the costumes, she was saying, do you? You students should probably consider whether you wish to surrender this authority to superordinates. It fundamentally was a left wing position, saying you should be deeply skeptical of surrendering power to the state, to the administration, and you should talk about that. That was the intellectual essence of my wife's very gentle email. The aftermath of which you summarized earlier. Yeah, I should say that the email was utterly balanced, as was Brett Weinstein's email to his administration. Right. There's no trace of racism. There's no trace of bigotry. There's no trace of failure, of empathy or lack of sympathy for the students. Right. It's like showing respect. I believe we show respect for the students when we say, we are interested in engaging you in ideas. Again, we're talking about people who are old enough to be shipped off to fight a war. We're talking about people who in a few short years will be on the job market as some of the most highly educated and in demand young adults in the country. I mean, these are people who should be able to talk about a Halloween costume that offends them. Yes, but you see, the problem is, again, this is, again, where I have some empathy and sympathy for the students, too. And so this is what is so challenging, because, again, you see, there's a kernel of like we discussed earlier with this notion of cultural appropriation and these claims that science is an objectivity claim, subjectivity are tools of oppression, these ridiculously extreme claims. There's an element of truth as well to the student's sense of alienation. And part of it, again, is developmental, 18 to 22 year olds feel a sense of alienation. We all did different ways. And now if you're a minority student in these institutions, there may be an extra burden of alienation that you feel. And I think there are ways that we can discuss that with students. I think there are ways we can reform our institutions, and I don't lack sympathy for that. But as Jonathan Height has said, I think the fundamental commitment of these institutions is to luxe at veritas. And this has to be done in a way in which we retain a deep and abiding commitment to speaking the truth and having open expression. So then what happened? She sent the email and some fear erupted, and then you stepped out of the building to talk to an assembled group of students. How did the the YouTube video we've seen I'm not sure I'd want to go into all the details because it's, you know, it's it's remotely if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Okay, well, for this episode, the first of the new year, I am presenting the audio of my live event with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro that we did in San Francisco a few weeks back. To say that this audio has been much anticipated really is an understatement. Ben has an enormous following online, and I have been hearing from all of you, mostly on social media and in comment threads. I really haven't been sitting on this audio for any other reason than I had many other podcasts in the queue and I couldn't decently hold them for much longer. But the time has arrived and I just have a few things to say. By way of preamble. I introduced both of these guys on stage, so I don't need to do that here. Eric Weinstein. Many of you know from a previous podcast, he's always great. Ben, as many of you know, is quite a polarizing and controversial figure. I got a fair amount of grief when I announced that we would be doing a podcast together. Also, a ton of enthusiasm from his fans. Needless to say, I can't take responsibility for everything Ben has said or written in the past. I'm certainly unaware of most of what he's said and written, but I'm aware of enough to know that he has, like many of us, operating in this space on these topics, been unfairly maligned and demonized by his detractors. I think any comparison between him and Milo Yanopoulos is quite unfair given the differences in how they operate. This is something I say on stage at the beginning of this event, but that's a comparison that's often made. Ben and I disagree about some fundamental things here, and I found myself in a situation which I often find myself in on the podcast, where I have to play host and debate partner simultaneously. And I've begun to feel that there really is no perfect way to split that baby, and I certainly didn't do it perfectly here. More and more, I try to err on the side of being the gracious host who is not going to let things get bogged down, but the scientist and philosopher in me, who can't let a bad point stand, invariably flirts with the ditch on the other side of the road. So you can decide whether I struck the right balance here. Ben and I disagree fundamentally about religion and its connection to human values. We disagree about free will. I tackled some of these points as they came up and let others go in the interest of not getting bogged down. But I think Ben and I did about as well as we could here, where we disagreed, given the nature of the event. But you be the judge. I should say that despite our disagreements, the vibes with Ben were great in the green room beforehand. Afterwards. This was a very fun and collegial experience for everyone, and I'm very grateful for Eric and Ben's participation as well. As to all of you who came out for the event. We had a packed house at the Masonic in San Francisco, and from what I can tell, most of you had a lot of fun. So, without further delay, I give you the Waking Up Podcast. Live from San Francisco with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro. Thank you. Okay, well, sorry for the late start. I'm going to jump right into it because we have a lot to talk about. I've got two guests tonight, and the first is a mathematician. He has a PhD from Harvard, and he has held research positions at Harvard and MIT and Hebrew University and Oxford. You may have heard him before on my podcast. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever met, and honestly, that's saying a lot. And along with his brother Brett, who I just did a podcast with last night in Seattle, he has become one of the most valuable defenders of free speech in our time. So please welcome Eric Weinstein. Thank you for governor. And our next contestant is the editor in chief of DailyWire.com. He is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, so Guess His Name, which is the top conservative podcast in the nation. He is the author of seven books, and he has been a nationally syndicated columnist since the age of 17. Pity he got such a late start. He's a graduate of UCLA in Harvard Law School. Please welcome Ben Shapiro. Thank you for coming. So we have a lot to get into here, and there are areas of agreement. I mean, many of you know who these two guys are, and you can imagine the course we're going to chart here. I want to start with Ben because he's had a truly unusual experience, and many of you may not be aware of just how unusual. And this will take us into areas of agreement, Ben, where we definitely agree, which is around the primacy of free speech and how strange our national conversation is on so many topics. So Ben, if you don't know, is the person who, when he goes to Berkeley, requires berkeley University requires $600,000 worth of security to give a speech. We have a little bit less security here tonight, so please behave yourselves. But it's a bit ben, what what's what's been going on? What has it been like to be you in the last two years? Confusing it's I've always been a little bit bewildered by the scope of the opposition at these college speeches because I don't actually think that my message is supremely controversial. It's pretty mainstream and conservative, and yet when I show up on campuses at Cal State Los Angeles, there was a near riot when I went to Berkeley. Obviously, they required a fair bit of security, thanks to Antifa, and when I was at DePaul University, banned me outright. They threatened to arrest me if I stepped foot on their campus. Even though students had invited me, University of Wisconsin, they actually tried to pass a law banning the Heckler's vehicle, basically, after I spoke to University of Wisconsin. So I think it has far less to do with me than it does with this kind of mood in the country that's so polarized and so crazed. And I would say with regard to college campuses unique to the political left, I'm not seeing a lot of it from the political right. The political right certainly has its own problems at this point in time, but what's going on on campuses is something that I've been speaking on college campuses for most of my career. So 15 years, and only in the last couple have I needed security. The first time I ever acquired security guards was last year. And now every place I go, oh, I have to have security guards when it's a public event. And also, you're getting it from both sides in a way that's completely surreal, because, for instance, you were often disparaged as a Nazi or a white supremacist. Theamica gives me away on that. Yeah, but even if you were not going to notice theamica, you were actually the most targeted victim of antisemitism in, what, 2016? Among journalists on Twitter, anyway. It is upside down. And you're also often compared to your former Breitbart colleague, Milo Yanopoulos. Right. And and that's yeah, that's an unfortunate pairing. Because the reason why I wanted to talk to you is because while I think you and I will disagree about several, maybe foundational things, I see you as someone who is sincerely defending a position based on a rational chain of argumentation based on first principles that we may or may not share. But you're not a performance artist, and that's a crucial distinction. I mean, that's at least what I'm going for, right? I've always thought that what I'm trying to do anyway, is say things that I think are true, and if they piss you off, they piss you off. But I'm not going in there with the idea I need to piss somebody off to make a headline. That's why I've always found this a little bit puzzling, because there are provocateurs whose job it is to go into a university, say something deliberately provocative, just to get a rise out of people and get a headline. And since that really is not my Mo, I've been sort of puzzled, frankly, by the level of opposition on all sides. It was a very weird year. I mean, last year was a weird year. I had the alt right calling me a Black Lives Matter activist and Black Lives Matter calling me an alt writer. So it was unique time, 2016. We're still living in a parallel universe in which Marty McFly actually did not stop if from using the sports yearbook. One lens through which I want us to view the this conversation is really two lenses. It's it's what most worries you and what most interests you at this point? Let's start with the worry. Where are you at this moment? Well, I guess for me, I've tried to localize my concern with the breakdown of what I call semireliable communal sense making. If something happens, it's a very Eric Weinstein phrase. This is the reason my Twitter follower count is Orders of Bankitude below yours. The idea being that if something happens and everybody in the audience processes it, we will fall into certain clusters. And those clusters are fairly reliable and dependent to Ben's point that he is both Black Lives Matter and Altright in the Schrodinger superposition. So what is that? And it has to do with the fact that traditionally we've used institutions to guide our sensemaking and to make sense of things collectively and that has now gone away. And so, depending upon what institutions I'm hooked up to, what was my last? Where did the fox last have the scent? I can be at odds with somebody I love, somebody who I've thought about as somebody I've shared a life with because there's no longer any way to do this communal. And the semirelible I don't think that Walter Cronkite was actually always telling us the truth, but it was in some sense, to first approximation, close enough that there was a national consciousness belief structure. There was enough shared sort of complex for us to function as a country. And I think that that's gone away. So I think this is the parent of the crisis, which I increasingly think of as this I call it the no name revolution, or the N squared revolution, where in some sort of new regime, which doesn't look like any revolution we've seen before, it's much less physically violent. So far. It's digitally extremely violent and it has to do with the fact that we can't make sense of things communally at some semi reliable level. And what are the ideas or sets of ideas that you think are most culpable for bringing us here? Well, it's tough. I think that what really happened, if we think about it historically, is that we had this beautiful period of fairly reliable, high, evenly distributed, technologically led growth after World War II up until about, let's say, 1970. And we predicated all of our institutions on this expectation that this growth was some sort of normal thing that we could depend upon in the future. When it ran out, we were left with all of our institutions looking in some form or another like Ponzi schemes. And in order to keep running an institution that expected growth in a steady state condition, let's say you need to change the narrative to create some sort of as if growth story. So you start stealing from the future. You start stealing from groups that are too weak to defend their own economic interest so that certain slices can keep growing even if the pie doesn't grow so well. There are certain areas that kept growing, like communications and computation. So there was some real growth, maybe fracking. But in general, what we have is we have a bunch of institutions that used to be capable of honesty, that had to develop narratives. And that the problem, is we've had as if growth across the spectrum for most of our adult lives. And that story, which is a fiction, ran out. You're not one of these anti capitalists I've been hearing about, are you're? The Managing Director of Teal Capital. So that wouldn't be good. If this gets out, I'm toast. That's the genesis of it. So you actually think economics is the longest lever here that's influencing the machine? This breakdown of this failure of polite conversation to get us to converge on a meaningful worldview? Well, if you chase it all the way up the chain, I mean, markets are in some sense the continuation of natural and sexual selection by other means. And so what you have is that markets take over from this sounds like a very creepy come online from us. The night is young. I don't have to read this. Let me just acknowledge I'm actually a bad podcast host. I see. So you're not with an expert here. You're a good sport. Yeah, I think that we don't realize that when we look out at the city that nobody is telling people where to drive, what to do. It's sort of self organized with markets being this kind of invisible fabric that keeps us together. And so, yeah, it's really important that when growth stops proceeding at the levels that it's expected, people can't form families in real time. So fertility is threatened, people can't plan for coupling and for a future. So I think it gets right into the most intimate details of our lives when the markets don't materialize in the way that we need them. So what is keeping you up at night? Well, I worry a lot less about economics as the basis for social collapse. I think it's easy to overstate the extent to which growth has stagnated. I mean, we are at 4% unemployment. The economy is not 1935. This is not even 1975. There's still significant economic growth. To me, it seems like the social social fabric has been completely ripped apart. And some of that is due to social media and the fact that we coordinate with each other in a different way. But I think a lot of it has to do with loss of common values, like even the ability to have a common conversation. In order to have a conversation with one another, we have to take certain things for granted, like human reason, like objective truth. If we don't take these basic things at least for granted, then how are we even speaking the same language? And it seems to me that a lot of those things have disappeared in favor of radical subjectivism that may make us feel good but doesn't provide the common framework for a conversation and objective truth goes by the wayside because if we can't agree on the fact how are we going to have a conversation? You see this particularly in our politics where it seems like there's two bubbles that have been created and if you read Huffington Post you are in a completely different world than if you read Breitbart. And my mom actually first noticed this in 2012 because she said I was working at Breitbart at the time. She said well it looks like from Breitbart Romney's definitely going to win. I was like, yeah he's definitely going to win. And then all my friends at work read Huffington Post and they say that Obama is definitely going to win and I don't know who to believe. And I said well I really don't know who to believe either because no one knows the answer to that question. But you can see that it's broken down in incredibly radical ways now, because even things where there should be a common basis of fact, people are disagreeing on. To take the Senate race in Alabama, there's pretty good, reliable accounts that the Republican candidate in that race is likely guilty of some form of sexual abuse of underage girls. And a huge percentage of the Republican base, my party, my group, a huge percentage of them will outright deny that that's the case because they'll say this is a witch hunt. People are out to get Roy Moore. It's a conspiratorial attack on Roy Moore. So that's one example from the right and then on the left you'll have examples where you will say things that are biologically true. Take a controversial example like there is a male sex and there is a female sex. And if you say that then people will lose their minds because you're somehow insulting their subjectivity. And when you do that it's hard to have a conversation because people will change the terms they're using. They'll change the frame of reference they're using and then they'll toss reason out altogether. They'll say your specific bias as a person prevents you from even having a reasonable conversation. Your white privilege or your background or your ethnicity or all of this prevents us from even discussing on one on one level I can recognize my background and having an impact on how I think. But if that is supposed to be a conversation stopper then how exactly are we supposed to have a conversation? Yeah. So that's why identity politics is so toxic in my view. Because if identity is paramount communication is impossible because you haven't shared my specific experience or because you don't have the same skin color, you're not the same gender. There's no bridge between us. Right. And there's no chain of reasoning from you to me that should trump anything I currently think because what I think is anchored to identity exactly. We don't share an identity. Well we're atomized individuals kind of bouncing off one another as opposed to being able to form some sort of molecular bond. And I think that it seems like that's completely collapsed. Right. Do you think social media is the main engine of that collapse, or is it just we're headed there anyway. Obviously Fox News and the fragmentation of media precedes social media when we had our echo chamber. Yeah, I mean, I really don't think it's social media. And there's a study that came out from I think it was Harvard actually reported by the New York Times talking about how the impact of social media on polarization is overstated, that if you look at the most polarized populations in the country. It's actually older people that people who are older are more polarized politically and are having fewer conversations with people on the other side of the aisle than younger people. And younger people are obviously more apt to use social media. I really don't think it's that. I think that there is a ground shift in the way people think that's taken place even within our lifetime and has gained steam. And as I say, even basic concepts like reason are being thrown out in favor of a philosophy of feeling because maybe it does come down to lack of success for people. Maybe people do feel that they can't succeed in other ways. And so the way that they feel fulfilled, the way that they feel whatever need they have for fulfillment is by wallowing in themselves. If I can't find fulfillment in the outer world, then I will look inside me and I will look at what makes me special. And we've all been taught that we're special by Barney, and therefore, since we are all special, then you saying anything that disagrees with me is taking away my specialness. And that can't be infringed upon. You can actually try to look at the history of these ideas. Like, for example, you mentioned white privilege, and I at some point tried to track it down, and there's some two page it's not even an academic paper unpacking the knapsack in the late 80s coming out of Wellesley or intersectionality comes out of, apparently UCLA law School. A lot of these ideas actually began as kind of minor, interesting ideas heuristics that couldn't support an entire epistemology. And what happened was that you had some sort of vaguely approximate concepts that got pushed so far beyond their domain of applicability that they led to a kind of madness when they became sort of the substrate for thought. You can't really have conversations where white privilege is a barrier. If Ben has a drinking problem and I have a gambling problem, we may not be able to understand each other's addictions directly. But if I think about Ben's problem I asked you not to talk about that publicly. Step one, admit that you've got a problem. The issue is that this idea of being able to hack empathy and hack understanding by using our own personal experiences, our lived experience. To use the jargon and the felt experience in order to empathize across these dividing lines shows this incredible failure of imagination. It's as if there was no screenwriter who was able to write both male and female characters that men and women identify with. And so I think it has to do with pushing interesting but very limited. Heuristics so far beyond their domain of applicability. You can track each one of these things using Google Engrams to find out where they came from. Right. It seems to me that we're struggling and it's not just us, all of us are struggling to find a way to capture meaning and value in the context of a rational worldview. And I think that is a challenge that just doesn't go away. That is a perpetual challenge. Insofar as we understand the situation we're in, we need to find ways of talking about that so as to converge with a basic life plan with 7 billion strangers. And one difference between us is what we think the value of religion is in that picture. Just to get a little bit of the context here. You're an Orthodox Jew? What does that actually commit you to with respect to belief? What do you believe that I don't believe? That is salient here. Okay, I'm an atheist. Well let's see that gives you a clue. Yeah, I haven't picked up on that. It's going be to so awkward now. You kids have fun. This is Ali G. Well, I believe in a creator of the universe. I believe that he set certain guidelines for human behavior, that he cares what happens to us. I believe that he endowed us with an American sense, certain inalienable rights that accrue to us as virtue of being human from a judaic perspective, which doesn't really impact public policy so much. One of the reasons that I think we can have a conversation is that when it comes to public policy discussions, I try as little as possible to refer to biblical text, which means I almost never do. Mainly because what would an appeal to authority that you don't believe in do? I mean it's a waste of time. So in the areas where I think we can actually have a conversation where we're not talking about the value of kashrut or keeping Sabbath, which I think has very little relevant input for public policy and the kind of social fabric building that we're talking about, doing the stuff that I think is important, where we disagree, is man made in God's image, created taking the premise by faith that God created us with certain inalienable rights, endowed us with the capacity to choose, endowed us with the capacity to reason and cares about what happens to us. Right. Not sure if you could say right any more cynically. There one word can do so much unintended. But yet what I'm interested in is in a worldview that could be rebooted or rediscovered. Now, I mean, just imagine we lost all of our you know, we had all the libraries burned, the internet went down, we lost all of our texts. How would someone rediscover this thing? Now, we can make an easy case that we could rediscover science. It might take some time. But if the literature of Judaism in your case were lost, it seems to me patently obvious that whatever is true about reality is still there to be discovered. And if there's some part of reality that is ethical or spiritual or divine or spooky, it is there to be discovered by sentient creatures such as ourselves. So how would you reboot religion, the religion that's true? Because you are by accident born a Jew, right. And there are a billion people in India who weren't, and I must imagine that on your account, they have, by sheer bad luck, the wrong version of this story. Well, I mean, so Judaism is actually not quite as exclusive as a lot of other religions with regard to this. I mean, Judaism actually says that as long as you fulfill seven basic commandments like don't kill people, don't steal, don't eat the flesh of a living animal, that you actually have a pathway into heaven. So Judaism is not particularly exclusive and we actually try to discourage converts. So it's not quite the same as some of the other converting religions in monotheism. But as far as what's discoverable, I would agree with you. If the Torah were to disappear, tomorrow would not be discoverable. Which is why there is a necessity for revelation in the Jewish view. Right. The idea is that revelation was necessary, not that revelation was unnecessary, and that if people had not been graced with revelation, they would have come to this on their own. But the principles you just gave me, you don't think those are discovered? Those are discoverable. Right. And that's the reason why I say that I think that the principles that are granted through revolution, evolution are not necessarily I think that they caused a ground shift historically from certain ways of thought to other ways of thought. Like the advent of JudeoChristian thought changed the way of thinking. But I think that they are also things that you can discover through contemplation, for example. So all of the things that I said about free will and reason and the presence of an unmoved mover, that's more Aristotelian than it is JudeoChristian, right? And that is stuff that was essentially discovered through philosophy, not through revelation. So that is the stuff when I talk about the necessity for reason, that's the stuff I think that is more relevant. Now, I think that you do need a religious system in order to inform people who are not going to sit around philosophizing all day what are good and bad modes of behavior. And, you know, Voltaire thought the same. So I think that the notion of but is it important to believe that those good and bad modes were approved of or discouraged by an omniscient beam. Can't we just chart a course toward greater fulfillment, greater peaceful collaboration, based on just an intelligent analysis of what it is to be social? I don't think you can unless you're willing to acknowledge that reason, the capacity to choose, the capacity to act in the world that these things exist, and that has to be done based on assumption, because you actually oppose some of these things. Right. Like, you don't think free will exists. Yeah, but I also don't think you need free will to live a moral life. Right. I've never really understood that position, so we'll have to get into it. But to me, if you're going to have a conversation with someone and convince them, then we need to agree on the value of reason. The value of reason is not something that evolutionary biology suggests. What does reason have to do with evolutionary biology per se? It's a mode of action that is more likely to preserve your species. It doesn't create objective truth, the notion of an objective truth that exists apart from you, and it will exist whether or not you were living. This is not something that can necessarily be gathered from science alone. You have to make certain assumptions about the universe and the way that your mind reflects what is present in the universe. Right. As Kant would argue. Well, it's true that an evolutionary perspective on ourselves suggests that we have not evolved to know reality perfectly. If you believe that we are apes that have been selected for and all of our cognitive architecture is built by virtue of its adaptive advantage, in evolutionary terms, yes, it's hard to believe that we are perfectly designed to do mathematics or anything else. That is true. But you do feel that we can still gather objective truth. But even that picture suggests a wider context of minds more powerful than our own that could have evolved or our own future minds. I mean, there's no why would you appeal to minds that have not yet evolved their future minds, as opposed to just the creator who put us here with certain capacities? Well, no, because that I would argue we don't have any evidence for. What we do have evidence for is that we're here. We understand a lot about the mechanism that is operating now that got us here and that is causing us to be the way we are. We can see our relationship to other life forms. We know that we can look at chimps that share 99% of our DNA, and they obviously share a lot of the evolved precursors of our own social and cognitive architecture, but they have no idea what we're up to. Right. So they're cognitively closed to most of what we're doing and most of what we care about. And by analogy, we know that we could be cognitively closed to. What we might be capable of in a thousand years now. Our sense of what? Engagement with the cosmos. Promise. But I guess the argument is if you're arguing that we're cognitively close to certain things, then why are you arguing which specific things we are? No, I'm just saying that once you admit it's possible to not know what you're missing factually, ethically, spiritually, in any domain of inquiry, it's possible to come up against a horizon line where the known meets the unknown. You sound kind of religious here. Well, you wouldn't be the first to say it, but it's clearly possible not to know what you're missing. And if you kill I agree. You should come with me to synagogue. I've tried that already. But if you killed the 100 smartest mathematicians on Earth right now, Eric, you're in trouble. You would close the door to certain conversations, maybe for 200 years. Again, by analogy, it would be just sheer hubris to think that the 7 billion of us who are currently here collectively or anyone individually, have pushed the human conversation to the limit of what's rationally apprehendable about the universe. So we know there's more out there in every sense. So what you're imagining is that not every sense, right? Well, no, in every sense that this is why, really I'm going to have to have you over. But from the from the atheist perspective or from the perspective of not being convinced of any religion, this is what's so limiting about this notion of Revelation, because what you have, you're anchoring a worldview to a book that we know. We just know by the time of its composition and by its actual contents can't subsume right. The larger world view that we're gathering every day. So you're arguing past me a little bit. Right, because the argument that I was making was based on an Aristotelian philosophical view of an unmoved mover and certain properties that we have to have as human beings in order to create a civilization. And you're arguing back to Revelation, which I freely admitted that if Revelation were to be destroyed tomorrow, I could not recreate the Torah from memory. Right. It's not a matter of not being able to recreate it. It's just that what is its importance apart from being one among millions of books that have inspired people to the importance of jail? Christian revelation, in our particular context is it is the creator of the entire chain of events, or at least the progenitor, along with Greek thought, largely of an entire chain of events and thought that lead to the establishment of the modern science that you rely upon. Again, that's a set of historical contingencies that are but they're not coincidences that are contingent. Well, no, but there was no one else. My argument here is that you could also say that virtually everything that has been accomplished in human history was accomplished by people who didn't know a damn thing about biology. Right. There was no one else to do the job. Every bridge that was built, every beautiful building that was built was built by somebody who knew nothing about DNA. Okay? But that's not an argument that ignorance of molecular biology is a good thing or that it should be maintained. And I'm not arguing that ignorance is a positive. What I'm arguing is that no, but I would say that any kind of religious sectarianism is a species of ignorance. Now that we should be outgrowing and that's, again, an assumption that you're making based on premises that I don't necessarily agree with meaning. But on your account, the Hindus have to have it wrong. They're worshiping an elephant headed god and monkey god. I don't think everybody is right. I do think that the Hindus are not correct, otherwise it wouldn't be Jewish. Right. That's what I'm what's the significance? If you're going to go to Aristotle and you're going to go to seven precepts that anyone could discover so as to lead a well ordered life, what is the significance of being Jewish? So the significance of being Jewish is that even the foundations of what Aristotle believe that he's trying to arrive through, that he's trying to arrive at, logically have to be undergirded by a faith in a god who also provides us some level of moral guidance. Because even the precepts of Aristotle are too broad to actually create the civilization upon which we stand. Meaning this is not a Greek civilization. This is a Greek JudeoChristian civilization. It's the Athens in Jerusalem, in the typical phraseology. And if you just knock out the pillar of Jerusalem, then you're ignoring the impact that Jerusalem has on Athens and that Athens has on Jerusalem, historically speaking. Well, this is kind of reminding me of the moment when I debated Rick Warren once at Saddleback, just in his office. It was just the two of us and John Meacham, who was moderating, and he was telling me that basically without God, people would just be raping and killing. And you require this as an anchor for an ethical life. And he even said of himself, I mean, I don't believe this when anyone says this, but this is sort of the bluff that never gets called. He said of himself that if he didn't believe there was a Hell, he would be raping and killing. Yeah, and I don't agree with that. That's actually not something that I fully agree with. But I do agree with the idea that without a I'm glad to hear that. Fair enough. But what I do believe is that a scientific, materialist worldview cannot construct a moral system because is has nothing to do with ought. Science is about is and has no capacity to say anything about ought other than constructions that are based in a notion of free will that you yourself reject. I'm happy to get into all of that. Time is short, but I've written two books on those two, and I've read them. But if that were true, how would you explain the moral character of my life, assuming I'm not raping and killing people or living a very life that you would recognize? To be glad to hear that I just said moments ago, I don't think that you have to be a religious person to lead a moral life. I do think that there has to be a religious underpinning to a moral system, because I don't think that you can you're using terminology that is based in certain assumptions about human nature that I'm not sure that you are recognizing that you reject. Right. Let's take the scientific materialist worldview at its very base. At its very base. We are basically balls of meat wandering through the universe with a bit of self awareness attached. We're sort of spinoza stones that have been thrown, and we know that we've been thrown. We don't have control over our own behavior. We don't have control over what we do. We don't have the capacity to react. No. First of all, many people who would take an evolutionary picture of ourselves also imagine that we have free will. I've never understood that perspective, to be honest with you. I'll put the free will piece in play here because actually, I think there are moral insights we can have when we see through the illusion of free will, which we really can't easily have without doing that. And then I want to bring you in here, Eric. Very patient. Not falling for that twice. Well, I think part of the problem one of the problems is that in some very weird way, because Ben is wearing a kippa, we think of him as being very orthodox, pious and religious. In fact, I'm always struck by just how much he has chose any appeal to text in his public argument. So for functional reasons, I very often see him in a largely atheistic context. I find, Sam, that you're always focused on what is, to my way of thinking, very clearly a form of Judaism expressed as atheism. That really does sound antisemitic. Somehow I'll have to ask my rabbi how I just got insulted how much you're being paid tonight? And as much as I take a scientific worldview, I find that if I'm really honest with myself, I have a lot of certainly dialectical tensions that I can't resolve, needs for meaning that I can't find easily met within the rational systems. I think that the is and ought is a good distinction. I think a lot of this has to do with preexisting architecture that predisposes us, even though our rational minds may know better towards something that functions very much in an as if religious context. Well, let's just take Is in awe for a second because here's one way those two things collapse for me. If understanding how the universe is altogether, all the possibilities of experience, all the ways minds emerge all of the kinds of good lives and bad lives and all of the mechanisms that would determine one path over another a complete understanding of the mind and the cosmos. That's all the is. All the is that is there to be understood. If understanding that couldn't give you a complete picture of what you ought to do where would you go to get that picture? If you sum all the facts, how does that not give you a way to charge your course in this universe? Well, what else is there to inform your life? Well, there are these things that we notice in our minds that we can that run through our fingers like quicksilver, that aren't exactly facts these intuitions, these things that nod us even though we know the answer. We feel superstitious and we feel guilt. Economists talk about utility as a one dimensional object but how many kinds of utility and disutility? I can be happy, I can be interested, I could be fulfilled all these different ways of tagging utilities and disutilities. And if you just notice your mind, you'll notice there are all sorts of things going on in it that really aren't about facts. And I don't know where they originate. Neither do you. But just translate what you're saying, how I'm hearing what you're saying. You're telling me facts about the mind, which I agree with. There's kind of a congress. You guys decided that there was an objective reality when you were having that conversation. I suppose that there's probably objective reality. But I think that a lot of what goes on is that we've been in the shallow end of science where more or less me and let's say this gentleman over here share enough that we can probably agree that the square root of two is provably irrational. I believe that that's probably an objective fact but I don't believe proof checking is objective because we have things like the Amabi problem that sit in the literature for years and we think it's proof, but it turns out we didn't have the right proof. So we have situations in which we've been picking low hanging, easy fruit to console ourselves that we can all get at the objective reality. We've all seen optical illusions where some color is exactly the same wavelength but it looks two different ways because of the surrounding. That's a great example. Let's linger there for a second. Again, we thought we knew what we were talking about and then we find out at a deeper level that we didn't. And then we think we know what we're talking about again and then it can reverse again. But that move to the deeper level is more facts. It's more context, it's more objectivity. Right. But we already agreed on something that turned out not to be true as objective fact. The point is that I'm not entirely sure in any of these. Like, if I take the irrationality of the square root of two. There's a concept called not worth worrying about that does a lot of work. It's not worth worrying about whether or not somebody's going to find a mistake in that proof because it's so short when it comes to something like the ABC conjecture. It's been going on for how many years? We still haven't gotten our arms around it. We're now not in the shallow end quite so much. And so my concern is that it doesn't do a lot of damage to say we can prove that the square root of two is irrational. And that's an objective fact up until you start trying to extend that to more and more complicated proof. And then it actually matters that the original concept was the outside proof may exist, but proof checking isn't objective, and therefore we may never exactly know. But there are things that aren't worth worrying about. We call them objective fact for convenience. Sorry, let me make an objective what I think is an objective claim of fact that I think has moral that you won't agree with Ben, that I think has moral consequence that we should grapple with. And it connects to a very real world issue like wealth inequality, right? So wealth inequality is a problem if you think it's a problem or it's inevitable if you think it's inevitable. But I think everyone would agree that some level of wealth inequality would be intolerable and that we would want to correct for it. But wealth inequality is just one kind of inequality. There's every other kind of inequality. And there's this fact that none of us and this goes to the free will issue what we imagine is that people, they have a certain inheritance, they have their genes, they have their environments. You didn't pick the fact that you weren't born yesterday in Syria. You were born in a stable society when you were born. We can't truly own all of our advantages. We didn't make ourselves but most people feel that there's something like a ghost in the machine that has free will that can make the best of even a bad situation. Now, I think you probably agree that some situations are so bad that the debt can be so stacked against you that it's just life is unfair. Here are claims about you that I think are true and should be morally salient. You didn't make yourself you didn't determine anything about yourself that you would use as an exercise of your own free will. So you're very intelligent, you're very literate, you're very interested in things that get you ahead in all the ways you've gotten yourself ahead. You didn't create that about yourself, right? And obviously there's a genetic component to that. There's an environmental component to that. Maybe there's just cosmic rave bombardment that can help or hurt who knows what influences are there? But none of that is something that you have authored, and that's true of everyone in the room you have exactly the disposition you have, the effort you have. If you wake up tomorrow morning with twice the capacity for effort and grit that you had yesterday, you won't know where that came from. If it comes from a book you read, you can't determine the fact that the book had precisely the influence it had and not a little bit less or a little bit more. You are part of a system of influences. And so this is a picture, in my view, that just makes a mockery of the notion of free will, right? And it goes down to the smallest possible case of my getting to the end of this sentence, right? If I have a stroke now, well, then, sorry, I can't do it. But I didn't, and I didn't choose that either. Now, I think taking that on board does not rob us of morality because we still have a preference between excruciating plunge into civil war and needless misery and building a viable global civilization where the maximum number of people thrive by using a lot of active verbs for a person who is productive environment and genetics. No, but it's all happening. We can build robots that act, right? And I'm moving my hands now, but I honestly don't is the robot moving the hands? But the point that I'm making is when you say we can discern, we can build, we can create, we can decide. But it's exactly like you speaking now. You don't know how you follow the rules of English. Grant, I'm not arguing that you can't make a convincing case that I don't have free will. I'm arguing that you can't make a convincing case you can build a civilization on lack of free will. Take this case. The moral relevance of this and Eric, I'd be interested to know if you agree with this. It seems to me that once you admit you either won the lottery or you didn't on some level that conveys a kind of ethical commitment or an ethical obligation that you wouldn't otherwise have, you can't be the person who then says everyone just basically you're on your own. You either make it based on your effort or not. This goes to questions. Should we have universal health care? It's not just an economic you're going directly from Is to Ought with no stop on the train at all. Well, no. For literally decades, there were very wealthy and very sophisticated countries that took the premises that you are building upon and built some of the most repressive regimes in history. But they had other things going on. They had bad ideas of economics, they had personality cults. I agree with all of that. But the point that I'm making is that you are making definitive statements about value judgments with reference to a naturally selected interaction of biology and environment. I just don't know how you're getting from one to the other owning the truth of biology because do robots have morality is what I'm asking you. Well, no, they certainly would if we built them to have conscious states that they could allow for suffering and wellbeing, I mean, that that's coming. We're going to have to ask that question. So then we can be God, but God can't make us those kind of robots, is the argument. No, but should we maybe try taking the fun out of this? I thought I was trying. One possibility is that there's like a layer cake and at the bottom you've got quantum field theory and then you get organic chemistry and you build this thing up and you've got natural and sexual selection. Then you get systems of morality writing on top of this. And there's some sort of weird category error between the layers of this cake. So it may be that if you can get rid of quantum indeterminacy, that you have effectively laplacey indeterminism and everything is product of initial conditions and that takes place at the lowest level. But there's no morality at the level of exciting fields and electrons and quarks. So you don't pair that observable, which is like that quark is being unethical right now, with some behavior which affected whether some synapse fired. So that morality thing has to do with this very high up layer, which is some sort of social organization, which is not fundamental. And so what I hear us doing is talking about free will down here and talking about morality up here. And one of the lessons of physics is that every layer of the cake has well, it has its own language game associated with it. We call those observables, right? So those observables are paired with what we might call effective theories, right? And so these effective theories are not to be mixed up. And so every time we get into one of these free will conversations I don't know whether you're talking about free we have as if free will who was forced to buy a ticket to tonight's event. But to answer that question, really, did you actually I didn't have to buy one. Yeah, the night is young. You guys should totally get in on this. But the point is that I'm perfectly happy with the idea that I have as if free will at the top of the layer cake. And if we can get rid of quantum observation and get back to LaPlace and determinism at some higher level that I have no free will. But it's as if free will only because you actually are not aware of the proximate cause of your action in each if I look at a chaotic pendulum over at the exploratorium, it may have a very clear path that's determined through Newtonian mechanics, but I'm not smart enough to figure it out. So effectively, I'm super surprised and just sit there like an idiot twirling and thinking, oh, wow, I didn't think I was going to do that, even though I know the physics. Right. The point is that if I try to compute something that's much larger than I am, my computer can't handle that much larger system. So this is why sort of self reflection leads to madness very often. I thought you said it was going to be fine. Hopefully it's not that often. I'm still really interested in the app that you're coming out with for meditation. Don't hold your breath. But it is coming. Okay, but what I'm trying to get at is that the fun part of these conversations comes from making these category errors and the unfund part comes from sorting it out. And then when I played Johnny Raincloud, everybody will say, well, okay, I guess that makes sense, but it's no fun anymore. And so that's what I'm worried about. Well, but you're not disparaging the idea of a unity of knowledge. Right. Each layer of the cake, you can make a smooth transition between layers that doesn't maybe that I can surf your understanding of each layer. I mean, I have a fair idea when my wife's going to be angry at me for not doing the dishes, but I can't recover it from quantum field theory. So the idea is that maybe that the quantum field theory determines her behavior. No, but there's nothing about doing dishes that violates quantum field theory. One presume. It's not that you have to live in a different worldview in order to talk about the human relations layer, the moral layer, the free will layer or not. I can do my best, but I don't find it useful to try to think about human psychology from the point of view. Of course. But could organic chemistry if some neurotransmitters depleted yeah, so there are some ways in which these different layers can talk to each other. But there's no reason that I should be able to compute necessarily across these layers successfully, even if there is some sort of concept of entailment or determination. What I'm interested in is kind of a first principal methodology of moving forward into the unknown. Right. What I object to in religion and then this notion of revelation, is that there was some prior century where we were given the best ideas we're ever going to have on a specific topic and we must cling to those ideas until the end of time. This is the analogy or the rubric that I find most convincing. There's only ever been people talking about reality here. Right. And so therefore, you can either locate yourself in a current, modern, open ended conversation or you can anchor yourself to an ancient one and never give yourself the freedom to rethink it. And you could have done it with Homer, you could have done it with Aristotle, you could have done it with Shakespeare, and the Hindus have done it with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And you're losing no sleep over whether or not you should do likewise. Right. And so my sense is that we need to. Every question of societal importance requires that we now outgrow the accidents of merely contingent history, outgrow the fact that people used to be living in geographical isolation from one another and linguistic isolation from one another for centuries, and outgrow therefore, our religious, provincialism and just get to a common humanity that's using the best tools available to solve the hardest problem. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. And I am once again with my friend, Paul Bloom. Paul, thank you for joining me. Hey, Sam, good to talk to you. We've been making a habit of this. This is fun. This is a lot of fun. And and I just want to I'm Paul Blume. Everybody knows who you are, but I'm Paul Bloom, professor of Psychology at Yale University, and I want to sort of start by continuing a conversation we were having, you know, just just now and we've been having over the last little while. Well, I'm going to try to get you to say something nice about Trump, and I figured it's a way to do it. Put it this way, are you ready for it? Yeah. Well, I'm bracing myself because this is a heavy lift. Emotionally and ethically, spiritually, I'll reassure you. I'm not going to ask you to say anything like he's a decent person or he has any positive moral qualities. It's a different line. So here's how it goes. Imagine a competition that starts off with a lot of people, 1100 gradually whittles down to a dozen. And these aren't extremely motivated people. They are accomplished. Some of them have extremely strong records of success, and they're seeking after probably the most sought after prize in the world. And they have a competition that lasts a year, at least many, many months. This is seeming vaguely familiar and is vaguely familiar. That's right. Not a hypothetical. Not a hypothetical. Sometimes they battle independently, but there's a lot of face to face confrontations where they're in a room and a million people are watching them, and it's a zero sum game. Can only be one winner. And after a long, savage battle, this guy who actually had never competed before, who had no reasonable qualifications for it, wins. So as you've twigged on, I'm talking about Republican primaries and I'm talking about Trump winning. Now, I'm less impressed that he won the election. Once you get to an election in this country, it's a coin toss. You know, half the people going to vote for the Republican, half for the Democrat, and you're fighting for the smidgen of undecideds. But doesn't it say something extraordinary about him that he won? I can give you some of what you're asking for. I think, yes. He clearly has an understanding of television that his opponents didn't have, even though they were all professional politicians, and some of them are just anti charismatic. He was up against Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, people who didn't have a stage presence and couldn't be trained to have one, apparently. And you add to that his experience as a showman, really as a reality TV impresario, mostly. Again, I go back to my evil Chauncey Gardner thesis, which is the responsibility for his success really isn't in him. It's more in the environment. It's in the electorate's relationship to fame. And having seen someone on television so much. He was, in fact, one of the most famous people on Earth, even though he was kind of a Rodney Dangerfield character in the business community, but he's one of the most recognizable people, more so than his opponents. But that's the environment. I guess I should remind people not everyone knows the reference because I'm old, but Chauncey Gardner was this character in the Jersey Kozinski novel Being There, which became that film starring Peter Sellers. And he was a gardener who happened to be a moron. But he was overheard saying aphoristic things like in the spring, new flowers always bloom, or something like that. And this was mistaken for political wisdom. And then through the course of events, he winds up being an advisor to the President. But so in that case, it's totally clear that the audience is in on the joke. They realize he's a moron, albeit a wholly well intentioned one. And it's all of the projection and misapprehension and confusion in the environment that winds up promoting him to a position of power. And when I look at Trump, when I look at the things that he's done that have been so successful, like, you know, chanting locker up at his rallies right now, was that a brilliant act of political persuasion? Was he playing 4D chess with the electorate or did it just happen to work? Given the political attitudes and moral attitudes of 40% of America? And I think it's the latter. I mean, I think he literally could have said almost anything ugly and authoritarian and sexist. He could have said, and I'm just going to now spitball from the ugliest part of my male imagination. He could have said, I wouldn't want to see her naked, I'll tell you that. Keep your clothes on, Hillary. Then people would be chanting, Keep your clothes on. Right. I think he actually did say he was talking about her, I think going to the bathroom at some point in one of the debates, and the crowd went wild at the very thought of it. Maybe I've repressed that moment. Yeah, I don't see lock her up as a brilliant political move. I don't even see it as a move. It's more of him that allows him to show up as a kind of superstimulus to 40% of America. I mean, there's something so cartoonish about him, and he has the power of a cartoon. And you've got me on another anti Trump rant here, so I once said he was like a golem that had been conjured by every bad thing that had ever been said about America. It's like the physical manifestation of everyone's external judgments of just what the ugly American is like. But it is something like that. If you took professional wrestling and McDonald's French fries and the NRA and infomercials about bogus products that don't work and you just mix them all together and you stick them in the back of a tacky white limousine and you drive it around Central Park 500 times, you open the door, out would step Donald Trump. He's the confection of all of that American crap. And for whatever reason, that apotheosis of all that is wrong with us, all, that is just self regarding and obtuse that works for 40% of America at this moment in American history. So it's a kind of perverse power. He's got the whatever. I don't really follow the Avengers movies, but what was that glove with all the stones that Josh Brolin was trying to get? Thanos, thanos he's got the stones of fucking hypocrisy and narcissism and he's working on the banality of evil and eventually he will have all the power in the universe when everything goes wrong. So I have really failed in my quest to get you to see exactly. Is that what you were hoping for? It has backfired. Horrendously. So here's your counter analysis as I see it. My analysis is he has some skills in that he knows what to say to enrage many people, including you and me, and to delight so many others face to face in a debate. Ho go. He'll be savage and cruel and comic and funny in a way that other people can't in the whole places other people won't go. And these abilities, these dark abilities are a large part of why he's president. Now, I think your analysis is more like I can't reiterate your beautiful description, but somehow he spawned, somehow he was born and he developed, and now you have this creature with this disgusting, degrading manner, which bizarrely, is strangely appealing, and he gets no credit for it. It's just the way he is. Maybe I'll give you a little more than you have any right to expect. I can imagine in fact, I'd be surprised if this weren't true. I can imagine that behind closed doors I would be surprised at how he shows up. I bet he's got some level of emotional intelligence and charisma that if only given now that he's ruler of the free world, because I've never met him, I've never seen him in person. I would imagine that the person I see on television and on stage is not the whole person. Something has to explain the fact that behind closed doors he manages to keep anyone on his team for more than a day and a half, though often not much longer than true. But yeah, I agree. I don't think when he's sitting by himself, he's reading Dickens and writing poetry. Wouldn't that be amazing? That would be something. But I imagine that a lot of what we see as a show and it's a very, very good show and it's it's quite entertaining. And I think that he might, in his personal life, actually just kind of tone it down and become more of a recognizable human being. But there's something else, which is a very backhanded compliment. I think he's very good at being cruel. I think he's a very effective sadist. I feel that a lot of his vicious attacks on people, of which they number in the hundreds, if not the thousands, by now, have really hurt people, have really damaged people. And I think the bully's understanding of what will make their victim cry, he's definitely a bully. But again, the effectiveness of his attacks on people, the fact that it deranges their lives and often causes them to have to get security or move from where they're living, they're effective in really screwing people over massively. Again, that's not a sign of how cutting his or clever his names are for people or anything else he's actually tweeting. It's just the fact that he's the leader of a mob. He's got a dangerous personality cult behind him, and we live in an environment where if you have anything like that kind of social presence, you can just direct your mob to DOX people and otherwise screw them over online. And he does that. He does it totally recklessly. Eventually someone's going to get killed because of one of his tweets and there'll be no recourse. He's got to know that what he does is dangerous on Twitter. I guess part of what's driving me is almost a version of the argument from design, where if you see something complicated and in this case successful, you say it's unlikely to be random. So, you know, if if we were Theus, we might say, I guess God decided that Trump was this man and gave him this great fortune, but we're not theists. So I think what we should look for is some abilities, something, something going on that has caused him to do these extremely low probability things. But he I mean, he's the distillation of the American grotesque in a way that is, you know, we have not seen before, and we saw its manifestation on reality TV for, yeah, more than a decade. His theme song was, I think it was Money, Money, Money, right. And it's just the crassness of American bullshit if you played it with gold. That's Trump. And yet, through amazing happenstance, he managed to move it all the way into the Oval Office, and now it's there. And the juxtaposition between who he is, really, and the moral and political seriousness of trying to steer human history at this moment is an insane juxtaposition, and half of the country wants to see every institution destabilized anyway. The other thing is the lack of regard, the lack of respect, the lack of trust in institutions now is an all time low, and that is he is the personification of that change of attitude, and he's ushered it in to some degree. It also was the explanation for the fact that he was able to take the stage in the first place, I would say. Yeah, I'll just say I agree with a lot of that. I'll just say one thing, which is that I'm sure you've had friends. I have friends, too, who said they predicted this, and some of them did predict it. I sure as hell didn't. And I bet you didn't. So whatever happened, it wasn't obvious it was going to happen. Look, so question. You and I were talking before about the Democratic debate, and so can I get you say something nice about Sanders. What do you think of Sanders? I should remind people our last podcast was recorded just before the Democratic debate in Las Vegas, where Bloomberg made his first appearance. And I believe I was appropriately cautious in my expectations for Bloomberg. We were both cautious. Neither one of us said, Bloomberg is going to really rip it up up there and do very well. No. So I was certainly worried about that. I don't know that I thought his performance was as bad as it has been said since. It was definitely bad, but it's being viewed as just catastrophic. It could have been worse, no doubt in ways. But he did very poorly. He could have burst into tears. He could have cried, he could have shot himself. There's a whole list of options which could have been worse. But once you get beyond the sort of he did very poorly and he did poorly in a way that I think, unfortunately matched up with the negative view many people have of them, the truth is, there just may not be good answers to some of those challenges. Right. So that could explain it. But he did seem kind of blindsided by much of what Warren, you would have imagined. He would have practiced and practiced and practiced and worked with people and do the thing that these politicians do, which is come up with a joke or a way to distract it or a way to honestly apologize. And he seemed as if these challenges about the sexual harassment issues, about stop and frisky, he was hearing him for the first time. Right. There was a New Yorker article that gave some color to what those NDAs probably concealed. It sounds like he's going to release a few of them, but I don't know whether there is more. But it just sounds like he clearly is from the Mad Men era of sexual impropriety. And so the kinds of things he said, again, there's no allegation for anything he's done in the me too sense, which is certainly good and compares favorably with the President, who's trailing, I think, 19 allegations of sexual assault. This is utterly asymmetric warfare here. The fact that we have to concern ourselves with Bloomberg's bad jokes, where the President has managed to get off scot free. I mean, we're now recording this on the day that Harvey Weinstein was just found guilty of some degree of rape, and it wasn't the highest charge on which he was indicted, but he's still facing, it seems, a lot of jail time for what happened today. And Trump is a character like Weinstein, if these allegations about him are true, or at least damn close, we're not talking about bad jokes. So it's crazy that the Democrats are. The debate was, as many of us tweeted, like a circular firing squad. I mean, basically, everyone was quickly rendering everyone else unelectable. And that's what I'm worried about on our side, that we could just get to the general election with whoever the candidate is. This is somebody who has to function by ethics and political norms that don't translate at all across the aisle, and yet there's no way of transcending this basic asymmetry. So let's take this one step up. Isn't this the stupidest way to choose a leader and have a debate? It's what people do. People like seeing fighting, but debates demonstrate the ability to memorize good lines, to be good at interrupting, to be very fast on your feet, to be savage in a certain way. I've heard people say, we really want a good debater to come out from this sequence of Democratic debates so they could be a good debater against Trump. And it seems ridiculous. What a terrible way to choose a leader. I tend to have a libertarian streak, but I got to say, if I was in charge, I would ban debates at the political stage. No more debates. People should should be speak, should get interviewed. They should be discussed, their policies and everything. But this mano a mano demonstration of your basically combat ability is so grossly unrelated to what you'd want in a president. No, I agree. We don't do that for anything else we value. You're looking for a swim coach, you don't have them debate other swim coaches. You don't have university presidents debated out only for this. The problem with debates, which I've long worried about, is that the way to win a debate is to get a big laugh at your opponent's expense. If you can do that, you have won. No matter what else happens in the debate, it does reward any kind of comic timing or a semblance of comic timing, given the lackluster performances of the kinds of people who tend to find themselves on those stages. But, yeah, if you can get off a good line, you win. So it has no relationship to your qualifications for the office. I think there's one thing so you asked me about Sanders, and I think there's something I should clarify because I noticed some comments in response to the last podcast. So I believe I said last time around that I thought Sanders is unelectable, which I noticed provoked some house of displeasure. And I think I also wondered whether or not it might be preferable to have a billionaire self fund his campaign, ie. Bloomberg, and then be beholden to no one. And that might be better than the normal situation where politicians perpetually have their hands out and get entangled with special interests. And I remember you countered that in the case of Bernie, we're talking about small donations, not special interests. And then I further said that I wondered whether this just made him beholden to the leftist mob. And so some people interpreted this as my expressing a preference for aristocracy or oligarchy over democracy. So I think I should clarify that my paramount concern here is that we get Trump out of office for reasons that I have not been shy about stating. And so my concern with Bernie being captured by his audience is that he may be unable I think he's frankly unable to tack to the middle in a credible way in the general election, and therefore, I think he's just bound to lose to Trump. I mean, I know we have polls that show him beating Trump in some key states, but in the last few days, it has changed a little bit. But up until a few days ago, he has not experienced the extremely uncharitable vetting that he's going to get hour by hour in the general election. And so, I mean, we're now seeing videos of him, his recent trip to the Soviet Union, where, you know, their cultural institutions and their subways seem so much better than our own. This is at the height of the Cold War. We're seeing articles where he's blaming us for the hostage crisis in Iran and blaming Carter as a warmonger. You can find him looking completely out to lunch with respect to our foreign enemies. And he also can't say how he's going to pay for anything. And as the price tag for his promises goes up into the tens of trillions of dollars, literally. The 60 Minutes interview last night suggested that he was about to cut a check for a minimum of $30 trillion over the next ten years, but it was probably more like $50 trillion and could give absolutely no account, no credible account of how he could pay for this. And this is just the beginning. It's like the first 48 hours of him looking like he's going to be the candidate. I'm just worried that he's actually unelectable, let's say nothing about my attitude toward democracy or even Sanders himself. I'm just worried that promoting him is guaranteeing four more years of Trump. I think some of that might be true. I mean, one thing to realize is, if we choose any other name warren Biden, Mayor Pete we could play the same game, right? You could easily list all sorts of problems this person has. Not to the same degree. No, I don't see it. Bloomberg, I think, functions by a different physics, because whatever his flaws are, trump's much worse on exactly those points. And then you just have to sort of pick your billionaire. Yeah, but a lot of Democrats might refuse to play and pick your billionaire and just stay. That's the real liability. With Bloomberg. With Mayor Pete or Klobuchar, I think. Oh, God, don't get me. I don't know if you know this, but Mayor Pete is gay. I don't know if you're following the news he's gay. Let me rethink this and my whole political calculation, and I actually think that that is going to be a pretty serious liability more than Sanders Judaism, which I think will actually cut into him a bit. Yeah, I think that Judaism is a non issue or close to him. I think we touched that last time. I think that wouldn't be a fatal issue. And I don't know about the homophobia variable, but the branding issue. I mean, just the word socialism, whatever he may mean by it, I think it's fatal. It's literally like running as a pedophile where you have to then say, no, it's not pedophile. I know you've seen pedophiles in the movies, but the moment you're having to explain this word, you're losing. Maybe Millennials and Gen Z are kind of out of touch with actually awful associations with the concept of socialism. But they are when they think socialism, they think Denmark and Bernie's honest. He says, when I say socialism, I mean Denmark and Denmark. There are arguments as to whether this could extend to the American model, but that's what he's talking about. But the truth is, when you look at his history, it's not so clear. If you go back far enough, he's looking pretty red. Right. I think that's fair enough. So one of the things you mentioned was his comment on the Iran crisis with the hostage and everything. And you got it exactly right. But what is this, 40 years ago? Right. It it's a long time, but he would need some credible account for how he's changed and take him on the issue of Israel. Right. It's like he has the sort of self hating, masochistic, moral confusion around the politics there. He's got genuine antisemites and theocrats in his inner circle, someone like Linda Sarsour right. Who are advising him on these issues and literally functioning as his surrogates in certain cases. He celebrates these people on social media. I mean, Linda Sarsur, this is like having, you know, farrakhan as one of your advisors. I mean, it's it's just completely clueless about the the moral aid and political asymmetries here. So so you're making you're making a moral case. Let me shift it to political case. Do you think this is going to hurt him? It certainly should hurt him, and I think it would hurt him, yeah. I think in the general election, people will be completely freaked out by the idea that someone like Linda Sarsour could have conceivably wind up in somebody's cabinet. This is every bit as bad as anything Trump is capable of. Right. It's nuts. Let me offer a different perspective on something you said. You said it doesn't seem like he's going to be able to adequately move towards the center. And I think you're right. But I think the advantage of Sanders to say mayor Pete doesn't have and biden. Well, Biden might have, but the advantage of Sanders is he might actually take away Trump voters. He may take away people who voted for Trump because they feel that they hate the system, they feel screwed, they feel capitalism has left them, they've been left out of everything good about America. And I think Sanders could take Trump voters away in a way that a lot of other people on the stage would not be able to. Yeah, I guess it's conceivable, but then those are some pretty confused voters, and I don't know how many of them there could conceivably be. I think Warren I mean, just the amount of daylight there is between Warren and Sanders around just the word socialism and the fact that she can just say she's a capitalist and she's not tempted to brand herself as a socialist even though her economic policies are in many cases indistinguishable from his, I think that's a crucial difference. And, you know, she's not going to get it. But you know something? I I agree with it. I with you. I'm not I i can't explain what happened. I don't think anybody can. But I always saw Warren in some way, strictly dominated Sanders. Like, everything Sanders did, she did better. She had a lot of his good ideas, but she didn't brand herself as a socialist. She's incredibly wonky and smart. I mean, you may disagree with her, but she's very into weeds. She's very personable face to face, and then for some reason, some combination of sexism or bad luck or or I don't know. Well, she did one stupid thing, which I don't think Sanders has done. She got pulled into the wokeness to a degree that Sanders hasn't. Sanders is just still just hitting the point of class warfare relentlessly, and which Warren hits as well. But Warren got pulled into the intersectional Michigan. I mean, she literally tweeted at one point. I think the tweet was like, black CIS and trans women are the backbone of our democracy. I believe that's verbatim. Right? So there's some charitable gloss you can put on that. But the fact that that gets summarized in everyone's brain as black, trans women are the backbone of our democracy, all 17 of them. There's just no reason for her to do that. Right? She's pandering to a constituency so small, it's so short sighted, and seems calculated to alienate half of America. But that's not I remember the tweets you're talking about, but that's not what happened to her. But I do think that's a fatal flaw in her campaign. I don't actually know what happened to her in terms of what caused her to lose her momentum this time in this last round. If she were ahead right now and we were talking about her as the front runner, I'd be worried that she's also unelectable for reasons that are slightly different than Sanders, but just as concerning. So who is electable? I think if Bloomberg could complete a string of sane and seemingly honest sentences in defense of his record, do you think all those Elizabeth Warren voters would and Bernie Sanders voters move to Bloomberg? Everyone who doesn't want Trump will eventually have to move to whoever is in the general election for the Democrats. And I just think once there's a single candidate, any of them stands a chance of solidifying everyone's understandable concern about Trump. I think if you can't energize half of America around just that single variable, just getting this guy out of office, and it's hopeless. But I think things change once there's just one of them. The moderates are split between Biden and Klobuchar and yeah. And Buttigieg and Bloomberg. And if it could magically be Klobuchar, I think yeah. You know, that she stands a chance. It's just like everyone would just reset, and she does stand a chance. You know the person I miss? I miss Cory Booker. I've I've never met him. I've heard great things about him. He seems like a gracious, intelligent, broad minded person. He seems genuinely likable in a way. I don't find any of these people and also what he says makes sense, and he seems rational and pragmatic and all good things. Yeah. I could never figure out why he didn't translate better on stage or on television. So much of this is just the way people speak. And now we're back to the debates and how crappy they are. Yeah, it's a performance. But I really do think it's got to be possible to backfoot Trump in a debate. It's not too much to hope that in the general election, he could be consequentially, embarrassed. I think the best person to do that again, it's just awful that Bloomberg doesn't have more natural gifts in this regard, because if he had a great stage presence, he has the perfect biography to go after Trump from. Yeah, and I've been kind of ragging on him the last episode in this one, too. But one thing about Bloomberg is he actually does a lot of good. He gives a lot of money to charity. He gives over, I think, a billion dollars to Johns Hopkins money regarding working on climate change and gun control and helping other Democrats. Unlike Trump, he's a massively generous person. No, I know. I mean, that's why the juxtaposition is so invidious. But, Sam, speaking of juxtapositions, do parents matter? We're supposed to question about this. We agree to do sudden transitions. So this is, by the way, from Proxima Ratio, and that's the name of on Twitter. Yes, the name of one of Sam's 30 million Twitter followers. And he raised the question. And there's been a bit of discussion online about the idea of whether or not parenting matters. Yes. And this could have been seeded by our friend Steve Pinker circulating a Boston Globe article about a meta analysis of all of the studies that have interrogated this question, whether. Parental influence really determines anything in the space of how kids grow into adulthood. This thesis was brought to the world's attention, I think mostly by Judith Rich Harris. Did you know her? Yeah, she's passed away, unfortunately. I edit a journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, where we publish controversial and theoretically interesting things, and then dozens and dozens of people write commentaries on it. And I contacted her after her book and asked whether she would contribute to our journal, which we usually don't make invitations, but this was an exception. And she was very nice, but she said her health would not allow it. Yeah. So her thesis was that for virtually everything we care about the human mind, the human personality, human ability is basically 50% genetic, more or less than 50% environment. But environment crucially from the point of view of mom and dad, doesn't seem to be anything they're doing. It seems to be the influence of peer group. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@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 Sam Harris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. My guest today is Masha Gessen. Masha is a writer for The New Yorker. She's been publishing there since 2014 and joined the staff in 2017. She's the author of nine books, including The Future Is History How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017, and The Man Without a Face the Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She writes for The New York Review of Books as well, and The New York Times, and she's also been a science journalist writing about AIDS and medical genetics, mathematics. She once wrote for a popular science magazine in Russia, but then got fired for refusing to send a reporter to observe the great Vladimir Putin hang lighting with Siberian cranes. She's a visiting professor at Amherst College. She's won a Guggenheim fellowship, a Carnegie fellowship, a Neiman fellowship. And I've long wanted to get masha on the podcast. I've been a fan of her writing for years. We cover many controversial topics here, russia and Putin and Trump, but also the MeToo movement. And we touch concerns about immigration and the differences between Christian and Muslim intolerance a bit fake news, the health of journalism. And I found it very satisfying to get Masha's point of view on the podcast. So, without further delay, I bring you Masha Gessen. I am here with Masha Gessen. Masha, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So there's a lot I want to talk to you about. I will obviously properly introduce you in the intro and link to your books, but I don't think we'll be focusing on your books here. I want to COVID many of the topics you cover so well for The New Yorker, and these may seem unrelated. I want to talk about Russia and what's going on there and the relationship between Russia and the US. I want to talk about the MeToo movement and perhaps, well, if we have time at the end, we can talk about immigration, which you've touched on recently. And these might seem unrelated, but they really are almost unified in the character who currently occupies the presidency of the United States as problems that are both real but also easy to exaggerate or misconstrue as a kind of political overreaction to Trump. And I'm increasingly worried that any false note here, any dishonesty in how we treat these issues becomes just so counterproductive that in the aggregate, just seems guaranteed to get him re elected. Let's just before we dive into all of that, let's just start with your background, because you have a fascinating story for those who don't know you. How how is it that you came to be writing what you're writing and doing it in the US. So I was born in the Soviet Union in 1967. I came to this country with my parents when I was 14, so in 1981. So I was educated here, and I got my start as a journalist in the gay press in the 1980s. I spent several years writing about AIDS, which was great training. And then in 91, I went back to the Soviet Union, still the Soviet Union, on assignment, and that sort of shifted my entire journalistic career. And eventually I moved back to Russia and lived there for more than 20 years. I kept writing for American publications and writing books in English, but I was also writing for Russian magazines and then edited several Russian magazines in succession. And then I was kind of driven out of the country at the same time that many people were driven out of the country during the crackdown that began after Putin's re ascension to the so called presidency in 2012. So I came here at the end of 2013 and gradually sort of stopped writing for Russian publications and and then became a staff writer of The New Yorker. So let's focus on the Russia piece first. Why were you specifically forced to leave Russia? Was it just the reality of what it was like to be gay and Jewish or both gay and Jewish in Russia at that point, or was it because something you were doing? Journalistically yeah, actually being Jewish, I think, had nothing to do with it. But there are a couple of ways to look at it. One is that is just that the reality of being queer in Russia and being a queer parent in particular, I was threatened specifically by name in the media, by politicians, with having my children taken away, and my oldest son was adopted. So that was not an empty threat. The social service could have gone after me and could have sought, probably successfully, to annul the adoption. So that sent me into a panic and basically packing all of our bags. Another way to look at it is that a large number of people who were active in the protests of 2011 2012 and I was very active in those protests I organized a thing called the Protest Workshop, which was modeled after Act Up. It was a large sort of clearinghouse for protest actions. So I sort of was coordinating a lot of the street level stuff that was happening in Moscow in 2011, 2012. Everyone who was visible in leading the protests at the time was either jailed or killed or driven out of the country. And obviously, you know, being driven out of the country is the best case scenario in that case. Now, these are protests against Putin generically, or these are protests over some specific issue? Well, that depends on who you ask. I think that the protests were framed by most people as protests against rigged elections. I think that the catalyst, to a large extent, the catalyst was sort of the blatant spectacle of the transfer of power from Dmitri Medievaja, if you remember such a character, back to Vladimir Putin in what they made clear was a prearranged transfer of power, and the voters were expected to rubber stamp it. Now, it's not like Russia had had real elections for more than a dozen years. Elections had become an empty ritual. But somehow I think that exposing how empty that ritual was was insulting to people. I mean, there's a way in which things can become obscene when they're exposed, even if everybody knows that they exist. Kind of like genitalia. It's a common knowledge problem in game theory. It's often referred to, by that term of jargon. It's different if everyone can know it, but once everyone knows that everyone else knows it, it's impossible to not react to it. The classic example is if you're drinking in public out of a paper bag, well, every cop that looks at you knows that you're drinking alcohol out of that bag. But because there's a bag there, they can decide to ignore it. But if the naked bottle of alcohol is out there, well, then they can't ignore it. And it's that sort of thing. That's an interesting analogy. I'm not sure that it holds because it suggests that Russian citizens generally feel like they have civic duty that they need to perform if they're forced to do so. I'm not sure that's actually the case. I think there was something sort of deeply offensive to people's sensibilities when it was made clear how little they mattered, even though each one of them individually felt that they mattered very little. Yeah, that's how the protests were framed for me. They were really anti Putin protests. I mean, that's what drove me. I didn't want Vladimir Putin to preside over free and clear elections because I don't actually think it's possible. But I thought that if the rest of my compatriots were willing to, for once, pay attention to the fact that the entire electoral system had been dismantled, then that was a good thing. And certainly the protests were incredibly inspiring and invigorating. So what do we actually know about Putin that is uncontroversial? We're living in this surreal moment now where Putin appears to be popular, at least among Republicans in the US. And we have a president who will not say a bad word about him. And I want to talk ultimately about the consequences and implications of that. But what can you say as a journalist about Putin that you really feel is not, in fact, disputable? That's kind of a huge question. I wrote a fairly long book about Putin that was essentially a compilation of things that we know about Putin. If someone were to say, well, listen, all leaders of countries have to take a hard line from time to time, and he's not better, but he's certainly not much worse than any other prominent leader on the world stage. And it's not a terrifying obscenity that we have a president of the United States who treats him as a normal leader. What would be the first things you would say to, you know, what would you pick out of Putin's bio that would argue against that kind of carefree attitude? Putin is a bloody dictator who jails and kills his opponents and has waged several illegal wars to the tune of hundreds of thousands of lives. And so I do not think it is okay to treat him as a normal leader, no matter how much the current American president aspires to be like him. But what's the status of public opinion generally in Russia now, insofar as you can gauge it, both toward Putin and toward the US. And Europe? Because what we see, at least what someone pretty far from the facts like myself sees in the media, is the suggestion that there is an extraordinary degree of anti US. And anti European sentiment there, and that some of this is kind of framed as of a piece with Putin's popularity as a leader, that he's kind of bringing back the strong country of Russia that has been so demeaned, really, since the fall of the Soviet Union. How would you describe public opinion in Russia? Well, I wouldn't describe public opinion in Russia. What I would say is that in a country that has no public and no opinions, it is very difficult to talk about public opinion. And, I mean, that literally puts in, over his 18 year reign, has presided over the near complete destruction of the public sphere. You can't have public opinion without a public sphere, if only a particular position, a hysterical, mobilizing, country under siege position, as it happens. But really, any position becomes the singular position that dominates the entire public sphere, then you can't have any meaningful opinion either. Right? That's why the subtitle of my book is how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia, because the lived experience of being in Russia now is the lived experience of being under totalitarianism. Even though Russia doesn't have a totalitarian regime, it doesn't have a regime of state terror. But what it does have is a total domination over the thoughts and feelings and perceptions of its citizens. So there is no such thing as public opinion. But that view, the view that dominates that emanates from the Kremlin and that dominates the public sphere or what passes for a public sphere in Russia is the opinion that Russia is a country under siege and that it is at war with the United States and that war is being fought by proxy in Ukraine and in Syria. Well, that's scary, because even if you can imagine, most Russians are not happy with how Russia is being governed. If you think that there's a consensus that really the real enemy is outside and it's the US. It paints a picture of the potential for a dangerous level of support for ramping up of aggression. I remember hearing at one point that the prospect of nuclear war with the US was being kind of casually referenced in the context of some political campaign. I don't know if it was Putin's or someone else's in Russia. And there is nobody else in Russia right. Or one of its proxy political campaigns. Yeah, but the idea that the prospect of nuclear war, in particular between Russia and the United States, could be a kind of happy talking point over there. First of all, is that factually correct or what is that story that I'm dimly recalling? It's an understatement. It's not just a stuff of political campaigning. It is enshrined in Russia's military doctrine that I believe was changed in 2012. Don't quote me on that. It may have been 2013, but the Russian military doctrine reserves the right of first strike in response to any attack, including a non nuclear one that threatens the integrity of the Russian Federation and Russia. The Russian military doctrine also identifies the United States and NATO member countries as its primary strategic enemies. I can only imagine we have a similar doctrine. Right. We haven't disavowed any possibility of first strike on our side, have we? I would have to check. But I believe that according to the military doctrine, first strike is actually reserved for immediate nuclear threat or nuclear strike. And that is a difference. Right. So the bar is higher. So the belief that America is the enemy is insofar. As you say, you can't really judge public opinion, but you feel that this notion is fairly well subscribed. However cynical people might be about the information that comes to them through state run media. I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying. Or maybe I'm not making myself very clear that's quite possible. I'm not saying that public opinion can't be judged, and I'm not saying that people are cynical. I'm saying that public opinion actually doesn't exist. I'm saying that people have been robbed of the ability to form their own opinions. Right. So it's just not a thing that is. So all we have to deal with is what we see in the Russian media. You believe you can't gauge how much the products of the Russian media that we see significantly influences the view of people on the ground in Russia? No, Sam, I'm saying people don't have views. How is that possible? Like, if we're going to ask everyone in Russia whether they thought America was a good place or a bad place, and they all answered that question one way or the other, you would say that the answer would be meaningless. Yes, I would say that the answer would be meaningless, because you can predict with 90% accuracy, or actually 86% accuracy, as the polls show, that people will say exactly what was last on television. So if a television is talking about the United States being the enemy, then if you conduct a public opinion poll, then you would get 86% of people saying, yes, the United States is our enemy. If tomorrow we become best friends with the United States, people will say exactly that. That's what a totalitarian society looks like. And that's what I mean when I say that people don't actually have views or it is a matter of survival in a totalitarian state to be able to accurately mirror the signal that comes from above. Well, that's interesting. I'll just put the question to you, given that, is there potentially a silver lining to Trump's approach to Russia? The fact that we have this glad handing narcissist who simply does not care or maybe even seem to know about the human rights violations of the people he's creating photo ops with? The fact that Trump is taking that approach to Putin, and we'll leave aside the Russian hacking scandal and everything else that might trouble us, is there a potential silver lining there in that relations can thaw between the US. And Russia, and then a different message gets passed to the Russian population, and we essentially de escalate a very tense situation, albeit with various casualties. It doesn't help people in Syria. It doesn't help people in Russia all that much. But it it does possibly close the door a little bit to the prospect of some horrible conflagration between Russia and the US. I don't see how that happens, because, you know, the imaginary mortal combat between the United States and Russia is not a function of American politics or American behavior. It is a function of Putin's need to have a mobilizing idea. The only mobilizing idea large enough to fit sort of the superpower ambitions left over from the Soviet Union is the idea of conflict with the United States. Putin has absolutely no interest in having that conflict diffused because his entire politics is constructed around that conflict. That's interesting. We have this summit or this meeting coming up between Trump and Putin. Let's say that is yet another instance of just happy talk between the two leaders. How will Putin represent that internally to Russia? He will show that the American president has come asking for a meeting that that acknowledges that Russia is regaining its superpower status. I mean, that is the ultimate ambition. The ultimate sort of insult, as Putin has framed it, is Russia's loss of its place as one of the two poles of power in the world. And Russia's ambition is to reclaim that that that place. And so Trump's desire, his near begging for a summit with Putin, is a reflection of of of Putin's success. And that's how it's going to be framed in Russia. So if we had a different president and a different policy, what would you want the US. Posture to be with respect to Russia now? Is there anything that would, in your mind, reliably move us in a productive direction or put pressure on Putin that would be not merely edging us toward conflict, but actually destabilize him within Russia? I don't know that that's possible. And so I don't think that that's how we need to think about foreign policy. Republicans are terribly fond of talking about values based foreign policy, which they haven't practiced since at least the times of Reagan, if ever. But I think that that's actually how we need to be thinking about it. And that requires a real reframing. You have to admit that it's extremely unlikely that any American actions will actually influence Putin's politics. Putin's politics are determined by his own logic of survival. So the question becomes not how do we destabilize Putin, but what is the right thing to do? Or perhaps more productively, what are the wrong things to do? It is wrong to sit down with a dictator who murders his opponents. It is wrong to seek to have common ground with a dictator who murders his opponents. It is wrong to even entertain the possibility of an alliance with a leader who is waging illegal wars. So everything you just said, at least for me, could be said about North Korea. Do you view them as similar situations? Absolutely. Let's just talk about Trump and in the US context. Well, first of all, what do you believe is true that explains Trump's unwillingness to notice anything unsavory about Putin? The Mueller investigation runs its course. We find out everything we're going to find out. Is there a there in your mind whether it's financial entanglements or something more unseemly? But what do you think is true and what do you think the consequences are of it seems that half the US. Population simply doesn't care what may or may not be true and just views it as a witch hunt. So, first of all, I don't think that you can ask, what do you think is true? There are things I know to be true, and there are things I know that I don't know. Right, but given what you know to be true, what would not surprise you? First, obviously, I would like I appreciate the bright line between what you think you know to be true and everything else that's conjecture. But conjecture is as much as you're comfortable with, I guess. Well, so what we know to be true is that Trump has never met a dictator he doesn't like. So, in a sense, we don't need the Mueller investigation to explain his evident affinity for Putin. He has a desperate desire to be liked and affirmed by the dictators of the world. He has an understanding of power that is as close to the understanding of power that is reflected by Duterte or Putin or the leaders of North Korea and China or even BB. Netanyahu. That's his understanding of power. That's what he understands. He does not understand sort of the imperfect, incomplete power wielded by elected officials. In actual democracies. Yes, the strong man archetype of the the leader is the one he recognizes and seems to want to embody. He wants 100% of Americans to support him. He thinks that that is the desired outcome. He doesn't understand that that's what happens in a totalitarian society. So how much have you gone down the rabbit hole of thinking about, reading about, wondering about more of an ulterior motive for not criticizing Putin, his own financial needs for his real estate branding empire? Well, again, evidently we don't need to find an ulterior motive to understand what's going on here. A crucial difference would be in revealing the latter. That would seem impeachable. A fondness for dictators, while perhaps it should be impeachable, is not the kind of thing that can be made salient enough, it seems to his fellow Republicans that they will even comment on it, much less act against it. I don't think anything is impeachable until you know that at least the House of Representative is majority Democrat. Yeah, well, that that may be the case. So, you know, again, it's like if you're asking me about sort of the instrumental, instrumental truth, kind of not terribly interested in that, I think we have a fairly clear understanding of the Trump phenomenon and his affinity for dictators. I mean, I'm not saying that the Mueller investigation shouldn't proceed. It should absolutely proceed. And I think the more we learn from it, the better. I don't expect it to be revelatory. Well, so then how concerned are you, given Trump's apparent affinity for dictators, how concerned are you that our own democratic institutions might not be up to the challenge of fully reining him in? Just let's imagine, for argument's sake, that he gets reelected in 2020. You've written somewhat about this that just what it's like to be in a totalitarian society or society that is losing its its democratic moorings. Again, it's it's hard to imagine that we're here and that we have such a difference of perception across the aisle politically. We have something like half of American society that doesn't seem to notice or care about all of the things you and I notice and care a lot about in Trump. I mean, the fact that we have a leader who has all of the instincts you just described, who's more concerned about applause and the size of his crowds and hankers for military parades and everything out of him seems like just the most benign interpretation is just the dumb ejaculation of a teenager's ego, essentially. But I think you are concerned that it's more sinister than that. So how do you view American democracy in the age of Trump now? Yeah, I don't think there's anything more sinister than the dumb ejaculations of a teenager that's beautifully put in power, right? In fact, democratic institutions are not designed for bad faith actors. They can't withstand it. They depend on everybody, more or less playing by the rules. The bad faith acting did not begin with Trump. It certainly began much earlier with the gridlock in Congress. And now we're reminded once again of the shameful spectacle of the non confirmation of Mary Garland. But what we have seen, for example, with the travel ban over the last year and a half, I think is a very good example of what happens when, on the one hand, you have democratic institutions that are designed to be collaborative and deliberative. And on the other hand, a dumb blunt force. The dumb blunt force for that will actually win. Right? If one side tries to find an imperfect solution and a temporary consensus and the other side is not at all interested in any of that and just wants to push through, it will succeed in pushing through. Well, on the travel banish, I would think some of my audience would want to know what I think about that. I've commented on it elsewhere. As you probably know, I've been very worried about the spread of jihadism and Islamism and those contagious ideas that jump borders, whether or not people move across them. And I think the travel ban is an idiotic response to a real challenge. So I don't support it. But my non support of it is in no way minimizing the challenge we have with Islamism. And there's nothing to envy in Europe now with unchecked immigration leading to this rise of right wing populism, and we are just by dint of good luck, surrounded by oceans and not having to respond to precisely that same problem. But I do think that even acknowledging the challenges in Europe, I think the travel ban is certainly the wrong approach here. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Well, I think that we agree that the travel ban is the wrong approach. I think we disagree on the comparison you just made between the United States and Europe because I don't think that to the extent that you can link the rise of the right in Europe to the influx of refugees, you can do the same thing here. Even the specter of immigration in the public imagination is enough to fuel the fear that in turns fuels Trump's politics. The fact that the United States took eleven refugees last year doesn't change this sense of coming doom. And that of course is also true of several European countries that took a piddling number of refugees but are seeing the far right rise in response to perceived threat. It doesn't help that you can actually find the cases where the fears can seem justified in Germany or in England there's clearly a less than ideal situation which the basic problem there is. Forget about the recent refugee crisis. It's just a problem with the failure of assimilation there, which you have to take England as the clearest case. If you run a poll among not even immigrants, but second generation British citizens who happen to be Muslim, asking whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, the response is 0%. Finding it morally acceptable, that's a public attitude that suggests a failure of assimilation that should be troublesome. Now, granted, the farthest of the far right populists are not so concerned about tolerance of homosexuality one presumes. But that's an example of the kind of lack of assimilation that could worry reasonable people and think that okay, we've probably had enough of this immigration stuff for a while until we can figure out how to get the various communities in our society to agree about how to live in a civil society. You know, I mean, as a homosexual Jew, I am not willing to exchange sort of my let me put it this way as a homosexual Jew, I am not willing to sacrifice Muslims sense of safety and security in the society in which I live for my own. And I think that's very much sort of the function of the rhetoric that we hear both in this country and much more prominently in Europe. Well, certainly some of the rhetoric, but there's also there's a problem of assimilation. I mean, there's a problem of Islamism, the, the expectation that Islam will become an ascendant political force and that the west will eventually bend the knee and Sharia law will be implemented globally, right? This idea that is subscribed by some percentage of the Muslim community, wherever there is a Muslim community, that's a problem of a clash of ideas and worldviews that we have to figure out how to solve. And we shouldn't be eager to import those ideas, those convictions, as quickly as possible into our society, no more so than we would want to import any other totalitarian fantasy into our society if we can help it. That's the concern. I mean, if if you tell me that we have 100,000 and this is a bit of a departure from the topic I wanted to hit with you, but just it's kind of interesting that we're disagreeing here. If you tell me there's 100,000 refugees from the Middle East that really need a home, and we're going to move them all to San Diego, and you tell me that they're all Christian, beleaguered Christians who are who require movement to the west to be safe from their highly sectarian neighbors, that's a completely legitimate claim upon asylum, it sounds like to me. And it comes with an assurance, insofar as we know who these people are, that none of these people are jihadists, right? None of these people have any fondness for Al Qaeda or ISIS, and that's all good news. I think you would probably acknowledge that. No, I wouldn't. You wouldn't say that a fondness for ISIS is bad news. Let. Me now that I've claimed this identity of the homosexual Jew, I feel much more threatened in this country by the increasingly powerful Christian right than by the powerless and marginalized Muslim community. Well, sure, but they may be equally intolerant of who I am, but the ones have the power and the guns and the others don't. So, no, both of those can be true. You're just not acknowledging that there's a I'm not acknowledging that it's good news. I'm saying that I think that both groups have valid asylum claims. But I am not going to get any more excited about an imaginary group of fundamentalist Christians than I am going to get an imaginary group of fundamentalist Muslims. Well, I didn't say they were fundamentalists. But you wouldn't acknowledge that there's a difference in the level of theocratic hostility toward homosexuality. Absolutely not. There's no difference across Christianity. That is simply not true. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, this is the kind of conversation I've been wanting to have about race for quite some time. At the end of these 2 hours, I think you'll recognize that you haven't heard people talk about race this way in a mainstream forum, and there's a reason for that, because this is just a minefield. Now, as I made clear at the beginning, I'm sure there are other ways of interpreting some of the data we cite on economics or crime, for instance. And I'm aware that there are other sides to many of these points. But all you've heard in the mainstream media are the other sides and often the most tendencies and sanctimonious and bullying versions. There is an orthodoxy on the issue of race, and it's taboo to question it. And it's growing increasingly clear that the orthodoxy is leading us in the wrong direction. Now, after the Atrocious podcast I did with Ezra Kline and all of the poison I wound up drinking online, in the aftermath, I realized that I had a choice. I could avoid the issue of race entirely, or I could continue to speak about it honestly. I've made my choice, apparently, because this is an important issue. In fact, it's one of the most important issues we have because it is so divisive. So I've been wanting to have a discussion like this for months. I found the person who could best walk me through this minefield quite by accident and in a somewhat unlikely place. My guest today is Coleman Hughes. As you'll hear, Coleman is still an undergraduate at Columbia, majoring in philosophy. However, he's written some extraordinarily brave and well reasoned pieces in the online magazine Quillette on Race. So I brought him here to discuss his writing. And I also made sure he would be invited to the conference we're doing at Lincoln Center in New York in November. Anyway, I really appreciate that Coleman has had the courage to tackle the subject head on. I felt like I was talking to a person from the future, or at least one possible future. A future where there's no such thing as identity politics and people of goodwill can just talk about social problems without feeling like they're walking a tightrope. But in this world, in the year 2018, we're still on that tightrope. And throughout this conversation, you'll hear me periodically look down and marvel at how far there is yet to fall. And the truth is, I expect a fair amount of malice to be directed at both me and Coleman from the usual suspects for what we say here. But that's fine. I used to be operating under the delusion that that was avoidable. I no longer am. So without further delay, I offer you Coleman Hughes. I am here with Coleman Hughes. Coleman, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me on. So let's get into your background for a minute because, you know, I actually don't know anything about it and maybe relevant to this conversation, this is something that I have remarked on social media, and as have others. You are still an undergraduate at Columbia, which, given the quality of your writing, is incredibly annoying. What are you up to? What are you studying and how did you get where you are now? Well, I'm studying philosophy. I have two more years to go, but I made my way to Columbia. Actually, it took me a little while to get there. Right out of college, I went to a music conservatory. I went to Juilliard. I was in the jazz program there, set on becoming a professional musician. And I ended up leaving after around a semester when I did Death in the Family and took about a year and a half off and then started college properly at Columbia when I was about 20. So I'm 22 and I have two more years to go with my philosophy degree there. And what are your interests in philosophy? I like Philosophy of Mind. I think that was initially what got me into it. Books by Daniel Dennett. Consciousness explained. I remember reading that and thinking that philosophy was something that was interesting enough for me to do for four years. Yeah, well, so this is the irony here, is that we probably won't talk at all about the philosophy of mind, even though it is my primary interest. And this is going to be a conversation that is framed by the path that we have both taken here. That is a path that I've continued to think about as the path of opportunity costs. Because the place where you're currently making your mark and where your voice is being recognized as indispensable is on a topic that I think you probably find intrinsically boring, or at least not among the most interesting, because you're having to endlessly spell out arguments that probably, in most cases, shouldn't even have to be made. And yet it's absolutely vital that you make them, given how incentivized people are, to remain confused on some extremely important topics. And I've done this in a similar way with respect to religion and the conflict between reason and faith and science and religion. I consider almost everything I've written in that area to be a kind of opportunity cost. And it seems to me you're probably doing a similar thing on race but again, it's very important that you do it because you have written these four articles in Quellette. I think it's four, right? Yeah, I think four in Quillette, which I'll kind of treat as a single text for the purposes of this conversation. And they're among the best things I've read on the topic of race and the problem of identity politics now. And this is all very much of the moment post Trump, and it's just amazing to have you again as an undergraduate making sense like this. So before we dive in, there may be a few caveats and warnings to issue, but just one question by way of background. How much pushback have you gotten for your views? So I guess I should spell out what may or may not be obvious for anyone coming to this conversation. You're African American, right? Are both your parents black? My mother's Puerto Rican, but most people saw her and assumed she was black. Both my parents are people of color. My dad's African American. So have you gotten a lot of pushback for what you've written? I've gotten a lot of pushback on Twitter, especially for the most recent one. The first few where there was good comments, bad comments, but this last one, it was like nine to one negative comments. I've gotten some pushback in real life from people who disagree with me, but I always find disagreements in real life, face to face, tend to go much better than on Twitter or wherever else online. So, yeah, I've got plenty of pushback. I can imagine you have, and I think I noticed it more for the last one as well. But if the pushback I get for retweeting you as any indication, I think what you're doing is highly controversial, and it's the pushback I get just crystallizes the problem for me. So in my world, when I retweeted your last article, you know, I was sincerely praising a person who I had never met, whose writing I admire. And yet, on planet Left, I was uttering racist, dog whistles and probably worse, promoting an Uncle Tom who, for some reason, is producing highly cogent arguments that a white supremacist like myself finds useful. This is the problem, because if in my world, retweeting the article of an African American that I agree with, that I think is amazingly well written, is further testimony to my racial bias. There's just no way to dig out from there. And yet there is a slight irony here, because the color of your skin is relevant to this conversation, because only someone with the color of your skin could do what you're doing right now, and a white guy can't be writing the articles that you're writing now, and it's not a good thing. The purpose of this conversation is to figure out how to get to some possible future where all of us can talk about race and try to find some way forward that doesn't leave any of us open for just this reflexive smearing and character assassination that's coming from it's predominantly the left here. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And the other irony here is that when you actually poll black people and ask them what they believe on any given topic, whether it's racial preferences or the influence of rap on society, you sometimes find astonishing results, which would be astonishing to some people. Right? We can get into these polls. But for example, Gallup did a poll in 2016 that found that over 50% of black people said that race should play absolutely no role in college admissions. So clear majority. Another poll back in 2008 found that 71% of black people said that rap was a bad influence on society. And I'm sure if you disaggregated that by age, you would find my grandparents generation virtually unanimously hating rap and my dad's being lukewarm and then my generation being a little more positive. But nonetheless, none of these views can be racist if the majority of black people hold them right. And it's like when I go to my family reunion, there is plenty of disagreement on all of these topics. There's clearly a way in which decrying and rehearsing the history of racism has become a sort of sacred value in the black community. But poll results show that there's plenty of room for disagreement here just among black people and it can't possibly be racist for white people to happen to have the same views as many black people. Yeah, well, that's a fantastic point. Just one big picture caveat before we dive in and we'll start there with opinion in the black community, but we'll cite statistics at various points of the sort that you just cited. And let's just acknowledge at the outset that many things here are debatable. We can cite data that can be, I'm sure, counterposed by other data. We might interpret data in ways that are open to criticism. But the reason why I'm having this conversation is that one thing seems to me to be not debatable. And it's that if we want to get to a colorblind society at some point and this would be a society where people are actually judged by the contents of their characters, we can't care more and more about race. Clearly, the path forward at some point has to be characterized by caring less and less about it. And that's why identity politics seems like such a dead end to me. But I think we have to acknowledge that one of the downsides of our having this conversation now is that you and I are both guaranteed to be smeared by the left for allegedly having an agenda that's bad for black people. Now, I don't know why you would have such an agenda. I know why I will be accused of having it because I'm not black. But we should just acknowledge that this is we're having this conversation because we think it's important to have, and we're trying to find a path forward that's good for everyone, black people included. And we have a vision of what that future would need to look like. And the path forward. You and I haven't spoken yet, but I can only assume, based on having read what you've written, we both agree that the path forward can't be this continual shattering of the political landscape into competing victim narratives. So, anyway, that's just a flag the masochistic pain we're walking into at the outset. And then let's jump in where you just started, this diversity of opinion in the black community, which, frankly, those poll results were surprising to me. I mean, I was poised to agree with everything you were you were writing, but I'm amazed to know that on many of these questions, like the question of whether affirmative action to get into college is good, you can find a majority of black people who think, no, you shouldn't be considering race at that level. Yeah, well, there's a framing effect here too. So if you ask the question, do you support affirmative action? And you ask it that way, you'll get majority support among black people. And if I'm not mistaken, you'll get a slight majority among white people too. But if you just phrase it a different way, which is to say, if you just give a straightforward definition of what affirmative action entails, you get minority support among blacks, which is to say majority dissenting. Right. So the 2016 poll I just cited, I think that the way they phrased it is race ethnicity, quote, should not be a factor at all in the college admissions process. So that seems to me an utterly clear definition of what affirmative action is. But if you just ask, there's a poll like one year earlier or one year later, I can't remember that just asks it as affirmative action and gets a totally different result. Which suggests to me that affirmative action has a kind of political halo around it where when you actually drill into the details of what that is, most people are uncomfortable with it. And indeed, most black people are uncomfortable with it. But when you just package it under the political label affirmative action, it becomes unchallenged. There's this phenomenon of black conservatism that is surprising to people and is just regularly ignored in the mainstream media. First of all, how would you describe yourself politically? Do you consider yourself a conservative or not? I've never considered myself a conservative. I've only ever considered myself either a liberal or a centrist. I voted for Hillary. I'm fairly sure if I had been old enough to vote, I would have voted for Obama twice. So I've never seen myself that way. It's just the way I see it. On the topic of race, the political spectrum is like a frame shift three notches to the left where what would otherwise be a reasonable center left opinion is kind of reads as a center right opinion, what would otherwise be a pretty reasonable, centrist opinion tends to read far right. So, no, I don't think of myself as a conservative, but I'm certain that I've already been labeled that way, and I don't invest too much in any of these labels, so I'm not going to fight it too hard. Right. There's a frame shift, and the people who are regularly described as conservatives or even gateway drugs to the alt right in my world, including myself, are almost uniformly liberal. I mean, this whole intellectual dark web idea that has recently been popularized, there's probably one true conservative in that whole group of people, and yet we are described as far right by many people on the left. But this phenomenon of black conservatism to some degree is mingled with the religiosity in the black community because the black community tends to be more religious than the white. Is that largely part of it? Yeah. I cite this poll in one of my pieces from I want to say his name is Theodore Johnson. He wrote a piece for the Washington Post. I believe that's his name. Yeah. He found that while 47% of blacks identified as liberal, 45% identified as conservative, which is almost identical. And my sense is that that conservatism is more of a social conservatism. Like you mentioned, blacks are disproportionately religious and on many social issues would tend to be more in line with a center right perspective. And Johnson's opinion about why it is that blacks vote so overwhelmingly Democrat despite being evenly split between liberal and conservative is that there is a sense that the Democratic Party is the party that stands up for civil rights. It could be as simple as the fact that Lyndon Johnson happened to be president during the 60s, but I don't think it's just that. My gut tells me it's also just the fact that if you put a true neo Nazi in front of me and just ask me to bet on who he voted for in the last election, I could win money all day betting that he voted for a Republican. And that proximity to the truly racist fringe of the Republican Party at least seems to sully that whole half of the political spectrum as far as many black people are concerned. You know, understandably so. And also the fact that there's, on many issues, not all that much difference between the two parties would just increase that effect. So it's interesting that it comes back to this issue, which you dissect out very much in the spirit of an academic philosopher, that it is at minimum strange to accuse a white person of racism for holding views that on any given poll, a majority of black people can be shown to hold. I'm looking at this one passage in your article where you say, for example, if a white person were to say, I don't think racism holds poorly educated blacks back, it would mark them on the left as woefully ignorant of systemic injustice, if not downright racist. But a 2016 Pew poll found that 60% of blacks without college degrees said that their race hasn't affected their chances of success. If a white person were to say that rap music is a bad influence on society, it might mark them as subconsciously prejudiced in the minds of many on the left. But according to a 2008 Pew poll, 71% of black people agreed with this statement. So again, it's possible to hold, I guess, any view, however correct for the wrong reasons. But the litmus test for racism can't be holding any of these views. Which leads me to ask how should we define racism in your view? What is the appropriate indicator of racism? When can we be sure we're correctly diagnosing it in other people? That's a very interesting question. One perspective on that is to take what I perceive to be a linguist perspective and say every word evolves over time, and language is a bottom up, distributed phenomenon that we can't control. So if it just is the case that people nowadays want to define racism as something black people by definition can't participate in, then who are we to say that that definition is wrong? Right, because words are only what they mean to people at a given time. But then there's another perspective that would say, listen, we need this word racism to mean exactly what it means. It's too important, and my biases are towards the latter. I have people in my extended family that I could only describe as black rednecks in the same way that white people have white rednecks, right? Just people with usually older with just totally retrograde views about how you view other races. So it seems silly and a little bit condescending to suggest that black people can't possibly be racist, although I'll grant that if you define it that way, then it's just a circular claim. But I guess racism is defined as, in my view, the belief that kind of essentialist characterization of a whole population of people who happen to share ancestry that holds that they're inferior, unfit for friendship and relationships, and just unfit to commingle with your race. I guess that's how I would put it. Well, let's make it even simpler. What would you consider to be white racism with respect to blacks? What's the bright line there, and how do we know we've crossed it? I guess on some level you have to go by somebody's behavior. So if somebody walks up to me on the street and calls me the N word in a tone that makes it totally clear that they are denigrating me, that person is obviously racist, and there's just no reason to mince words about it. But if someone behaves in a way that I find objectionable but hasn't said anything racist, I think people tend to make these kind of subconscious claims about other people's motives. They tend to mind read a lot and instead of attacking what you say, they impute motives onto you. So what is the bright line? I guess it's just behavior that is clearly racially skewed. I mean, you could look at an instance like the Starbucks fiasco recently where two black men were arrested for going into a Starbucks, not paying for anything, asking to use the bathroom, and it just seemed like it was too quick. The fact that the worker at Starbucks called the cops on them. It just seemed too quick to not have been racially motivated at all. And on some level we just can't know. So it's hard to actually be agnostic because the incentives are just to have an opinion, right? If you go out on Twitter and you say, well, I don't know, I actually don't have an opinion on whether that was racist, then you'll be accused of equivocating about racism downplaying it. I think in many instances it's just wiser to actually be agnostic until you know the facts. Yeah, well, I totally agree there. With respect to that case, I simply don't know enough of the details. So much of this is based on people's behavior and just the kind of crime that has been suffered in that neighborhood and the awareness of all the people involved. I don't know who the barista was and how street smart they were or not. So you can imagine two extremes where it's just straight up racism based on the conscious racial prejudice of the person working at Starbucks or it could have been a totally plausible judgment call based on 1000 cues that are very difficult to describe consciously but which, at a glance, people can take in when they're feeling afraid of other people. And there's just no generic solve for all those situations. And it's not even the case that skin color is never relevant. You know, race is never relevant in those situations. We'll talk about crime in the black community at a certain point and no doubt receive some punishment for even having that conversation. But there are many cases where being a white guy looking a certain way should put other people on their guard for a higher possibility of crime. The example I've used before, which is by no means farfetched, is I mean, if you see a couple of white guys with shaven heads and the appropriate tattoos standing in the parking lot of a black church, those guys suddenly become very interesting because of their race and because of their haircuts. Merely to be standing where they're standing from a crime prevention point of view, to tell anyone who's working in a store or just living their lives that they can't use those kinds of intuitions which are driven bottom up by the statistical reality of crime in our world, it's enforcing a kind of dangerous stupidity on people. And yet, given the environment, I'm sure we're there where people are feeling like they can't act on intuitions, which in the moment can be totally valid. Yeah, I agree. I think the brain is a pattern finding machine, and it is a highly politically incorrect pattern finding machine. And if in your personal experience you find statistical regularities with regard to what types of people look a certain way and how they tend to behave, you will form a kind kind of alarm in certain situations, whether you want to or not. It's really not up to you. And there have been some interesting cases where, for instance, black people have themselves admitted to if they live in a certain high crime area, let's say, where they just notice that the people who tend to commit crime tend to look a certain way. Right. They tend to be black. Let's just stipulate that in this particular area that is the case statistically, right? If you heard someone had just committed a robbery in this particular city, you could win money betting that that person was black over someone who was just betting by chance. We could just say 100 years ago, you could have said the same about the Irish and the Italians. You could have won money all day if you heard that there had been a murder betting that that person was Irish, for example, rather than German American. So these trends change over time, but it's nevertheless true that we tend to form impressions and biases in situations not based completely out of thin air. Although some stereotypes are totally out of thin air, others are just rooted in observations. Right. So there have been instances where prominent black leaders have admitted to having a fear, right? If you're walking in a certain neighborhood at a certain time, jesse Jackson there's that famous Jesse Jackson quote which is among the more honest things Jesse Jackson has ever said. Yeah. And there was also virtually the same quote by a former president of Spellman University, a Spellman College whose name I'm blanking on, who said virtually the same thing. Do you remember the quote? No, I don't remember it off the top of my head. But the thrust of it was that essentially I sometimes fear black men. Yeah. I don't have it verbatim, but just if it was this is the Jesse Jackson quote. He said, I'll tell you what I'm sick of. I'm sick of walking down the street at night hearing footsteps behind me, feeling the fear, feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck and turning around and seeing that it's a white guy and feeling relief. That's basically the quote. And I'm sure he got a fair amount of pain for having said that. But I mean, the reality of I mean, maybe we should just touch on the reality of crime in the black community just so that we don't sound delusional here, but the statistics on black on black violence, which is almost the totality of the crime problem there. In large measure, it's the totality of the crime problem in many urban areas that have high crime problems. I can pull up those specifically, but do you have some stats off the top of your head? Yeah, I have the FBI crime data here, just the national data. I think the latest year for which it's available. 52% of homicides were committed by blacks, and that number has been relatively stable over the past two decades. It's hovered right around half basically every year. And you could just state it in reverse. To 50% of the homicide victims are also black. So it's a problem perpetrated primarily by black people and specifically black men, and specifically young black men, and also suffered disproportionately by young black men. For instance, there is data from the CDC that shows that if you look at black men ages 15 to 34, the number one cause of death is homicide. And even that slightly understates it, because you might say, I'm sure the majority of that is in the younger half of that age distribution. But it's actually the case that if you disaggregate it, if you just go from 15 to 19, number one cause of death is homicide. 20 to 24 still the number one cause. 25 to 34 still the number one cause. And that's a fact that can't be said about any other combination of age and ethnicity. And I think the important thing to keep in mind here is that among the things that governments do well, lowering crime rates actually happens to be one of them. So there's every reason to believe that this could come down given the right policies. So it's not just gratuitous to talk about it. Like I said, the rate of crime commission among the Irish used to be five times higher than the Germans in the early 20th century. Likewise with the Italians, it's maybe three times higher. And so we know certain ethnic groups have committed lots of crime in the past, and we know that those crime rates can be brought down with effective policing, with more policing, and with better policing. And obviously the whole challenge is how do we get there? But it's going to be very hard to get there if we can't even mention the statistics that describe the problem. Yeah, and they're actually a little arithmetic makes them look a little bit worse, specifically for young black men, because African Americans make up about 14% of the population, and as you say, they commit and suffer at least half the homicides. But virtually all of this falls to men rather than women. We're really talking about 7% of the population committing half the murders against largely the same 7% of the population. And when you see the crime statistics in a city like Chicago, the level of violent crime that makes America an outlier at the moment is largely driven by that phenomenon. And most people believe, at least on the left. That part of the problem is that now there's this epidemic of police violence against young black men. We can touch on to what degree that's true or not, but the net result of that is that many people think that there's simply too much police focus on the black community. Whereas I think you cite this book in one of your articles. Is it Jill Levoy who wrote the book? Jill Leovi, and that's how I've been pronouncing it. Jilly, yeah, sorry. I remember Glenn Lowry recommended that book to me, and her argument was that what you actually find, certainly in urban, gang ridden areas in America, in the black community, is that it's a failure of policing. It's the wrong kind of policing. It's under policing of homicides. And we're talking about the consequences of the worst crimes virtually never getting solved, and murderers walking free, and everyone knows they walk free. And so you get this unwillingness of anyone in the community to cooperate with the judicial system to put the most dangerous people behind bars, and then you get this over prosecution of petty crime, which is obviously terrible for any community and has been especially bad for the black community, as you say. It's very hard to argue that just less police attention is the solution here. Yeah. The way I think of it is this way. If an alien from Mars came to Earth and studied the past 10,000 years of human history with regard to homicide rate, specifically, they would find the homicide rate in South Central Los Angeles and inner city Chicago and St. Louis and New Orleans. They would find that to be the norm, and they would find the homicide rate in Cambridge, Massachusetts or other places where it's extremely low to be the exception to the rule. They would find that to be the phenomenon to be explained. I take Stephen Pinker's line in The Better Angels of Our Nature that much of the way this is explained is the state monopoly on violence, which is the police coming into town. The stereotype is of the sheriff coming into town. And that's a true stereotype. Right. Homicide and retributive violence is just something that young men tend to do everywhere on Earth until they can no longer get away with it because there's a police force that punishes crime, specifically violent crime, swiftly and effectively and reliably. What's happened throughout history is that we have to remember eugenics was a totally mainstream progressive orthodoxy in the first half of the 20th century. So the attitude towards policing black communities was essentially to let them kill each other as an almost a form of population control, right? Yeah. So what happens there is that a culture of honor is allowed to survive, whereas white communities got the benefit of more reliable policing, where black people, if someone kills someone and you're their brother, now you have to retaliate or else you lose face and there's just a never ending cycle of retributive violence. Yeah, that was explicitly stated. I remember reading some racist material of the time that, yeah, just let them all kill each other. It was essentially the view of the white community with respect to black violence. And, yeah, it's one of these painful ironies that the left is getting this part wrong to great consequence. It's not that again, this is what's so toxic about this topic. To even discuss the disparity in the crime problem is controversial. Your motives are impugned to even touch this topic, and yet how could you possibly improve life for people in the black community if you weren't going to squarely focus on this disparity? Right? Like I said, there's no reason to suppose that it has to continue on this way. If you just assume that in the year 2050, the crime rate has continued to drop because it has been dropping, especially in the 90s, it dropped precipitously. And just ask, what did we do to get there? It certainly isn't not mentioning the statistics at all. That that I can say for sure. And on the charge of racism, is it racist to notice in FBI data that whites are more likely to drive drunk than blacks and more likely to violate public drunkenness laws? I mean, you could wonder about why that is. It could be 100 different reasons why that's the case, and that could be an interesting research question. But if it's not racist to mention statistical disparities that seem to be unflattering towards whites, how can mentioning the same kinds of facts when they're the other way be racist? Well, so we'll talk about the origins of these problems and then the path forward. And the interesting thing is that understanding the origins may not actually indicate the path forward or in many cases may be irrelevant to finding the appropriate path forward. And this will be interesting and controversial, but there are two paragraphs you wrote in one of your pieces that summarize the political dynamic here. That worries me, and I just want to read those too. So to kind of frame this part of the conversation, this is you. Now, given America's brutal history of white racism, it is understandable that the pendulum of racial double standards has swung in the opposite direction. Indeed, it is a testament to our laudable, if naive, desire to fix history. But the status quo cannot be maintained indefinitely. Cracks in the reparations mindset are beginning to show themselves. This is me now. The reparations mindset being the idea that because racist policies and systemic racism has created this problem, the remedy must come in some form of reparations from the government or policies or the white community to fix the damage here. Now, back to you. Whites are noticing that black leaders still use historical grievances to justify special dispensations for blacks who were born decades after the end of Jim Crow. And many whites understandably resent this. Asian students are noticing that applying to elite colleges is an uphill battle for them and are understandably fighting for basic fairness and admission standards. The majority of blacks themselves are noticing that bias is not the main issue they face anymore, even as blacks who dare express this view are called race traders. As these cracks widen, the far left responds by doubling down on the radical strain of black identity politics that caused the problems to begin with, and the far right responds with its own toxic strain of white identity politics. Stale grievances are dredged up from history and used to justify double standards that create fresh grievances in turn. And beneath all of this lies the tacit claim that blacks are uniquely constrained by history in a way that Jewish Americans, East Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and countless other historically marginalized ethnic groups are not. In the midst of this breakdown in civil discourse, we must ask ourselves academics, journalists, activists, politicians and concerned citizens alike if we are on a path towards a thriving multiethnic democracy or a Balkanized hotbed of racial and political tribalism. That just captures our moment perfectly. In my view, you and I are all too aware of what's happening on the other side of this conversation, this ridiculous and retrograde eruption of white identity politics and in the sharpest case, white male identity politics. And it's easy to see this an amplification in other forms of identity politics to be thought on the left to be the only possible response to this. But again, coming back to the basic fact, if we want to get to a society where everyone is treated as an individual capable of taking any opportunity they can take, at what point do you start treating people as individuals rather than as symbolic representatives of any given victim group? Yeah, one point I would say there is. I totally agree that the identity politics of the left can affect an equal and opposite identity politics on the right. If you look at someone like Jared Taylor, for example, who I don't know exactly how to describe him, but I think white identitarian, perhaps white nationalist if you just look at the argument he makes, basically his entire argument is, listen, look what black people get to do. They get to organize around the variable of race politically. He'll say things like, the Black Congressional Caucus vets every bill that goes through Congress, not for its effect on America, but for its effect on black specifically. And then he'll just make the next logical leap why are white people the only one who don't get to do this? Now, that argument is based on a false premise, namely, that identity really matters. But once you grant that false premise, the rest of the argument is pretty sound. And that's not good, because then it's likely to be compelling to some number of young white men. The other point you bring up is a point about history and blame, right? So if you take a white murderer and a black murderer just hold everything constant in their lives, they've committed the same heinous crime. The attitude demonstrated towards the white murderer is not the kind of argument generally that someone like you might make about free will, which is to say they're not responsible for their genes, nor are they responsible for their upbringing. Just put all the mixture of causes that led them to offend in a box. You couldn't pull out a single one and say they really caused this. That's as true of white people as it is of black people. The problem all of that's true, but it's just impossible to actually have a criminal justice system that is constantly operating in that frame. We have to at least entertain the pretense of things like blame and praise just to get around in life, even if they're not deeply true. I would argue, and at the very least, whatever attitude we take towards free will and blame, it has to be consistent across the board. You can't just invoke slavery and Jim Crow to exonerate the behavior of a black person who is causing wreaking havoc on the innocent black people around him or her and not invoke those for other people. Right. The reason we blame people in the first place it can't be deeply predicated on the fact that everyone is deeply responsible for who they are because nobody is right. We just need to be able to blame people in order to make society work. Yeah, and there's just these obvious comparisons which again, are radioactive to even make. At one point in one of your articles you say Jewish people don't get to hate German people and get praised for it because of what the German people's grandparents did to the Jews. Right. This is one of these disparities that you point out where in the work of an author like Tanahasi Coates you can see expressions of what would be recognized to be racism in anyone else, but in Coates he's canonized for it. Let's table that for a second because I think we probably need to talk about Coates in a minute. But to stay on this larger point, you write about something you call the racism treadmill. What is the racism treadmill? The racism treadmill is essentially a pair of two beliefs that, in my view, virtually ensure that many progressives will never admit so long as they have these two beliefs that substantial progress has been made on the axis of racism in America. The first belief is that whenever you see a statistical disparity between blacks and whites, it's valid to reflexively assume that racial discrimination, whether it's systemic or overt, is the cause of that disparity, rather than the 100 or so other things that can be the cause of disparities. So I'll just take two quick examples to make this vivid. One is the fact that in the year 1952 there were four different southern states in which black school teachers had higher salaries than white school teachers. That's fairly astonishing if you believe that politics and the racial biases of politics determine every outcome in the economy. But economies are extremely complex and there can be a lot of racism in the political sphere, but just bizarre trends with regard to supply and demand and various other economic forces can make it so that there is some disparity that can't possibly be explained by racism because in this case it favors blacks. Right. Another example is if you just go to Wikipedia and look up household income by ethnic group, you'll find facts like for every dollar earned by the average white American of Russian descent or by the median white household of Russian descent, the median white household of French descent earn $0.79. So both of those households would just be viewed as white at this point and probably would view themselves as white and you wouldn't be able to pick them apart. And yet you have the kind of disparity that if it were between blacks and whites, would be presented in the pages of the New York Times and other respected outlets and reflexively ascribed to racism. And there are literally all kinds of disparities of this kind between different black ethnic groups. You compare Nigerians to Jamaicans to Haitians to African Americans. You find all kinds of disparities that are never talked about or rarely talked about because they're too deflationary of the idea that every statistical disparity can be ascribed to some kind of discrimination. Right. And the second belief, which is closely related to the first, is just that every culture is identical in the patterns of behavior that are encouraged, in the values that are inculcated, in the kind of social incentive structure that leads people to behave one way rather than another, and that there are no relevant differences to talk about. There are no differences that could possibly explain disparities. There's just no reason to believe that that's true. And I'm sure we'll get more into that. But once you put those two beliefs together, then you're in a situation where we're going to continue to have statistical disparities until the end of time. It's rarer to find I mean, I actually don't know of a single example in which you take two ethnic groups and by every metric they are close, whether it's crime commission or income or whatever it is, even if they're of the same race. Right. So the idea that we should expect parity across the board in the absence of discrimination, all the evidence suggests the opposite. Which is not to say discrimination can never cause disparities. It's only to say that you can't assume that it's just an empirical question. So insofar as these two beliefs are ascendant, then people will never recognize progress, no matter how much progress happens, because we'll still have disparities. And those disparities will still seem to prove that racism is a major force in society yeah, let's talk about black culture here and the degree to which it may play a role, because, again, there are many disparities which are accidental. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org. You./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Stephen Fleming. Stephen is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and is the author of the recent book Know Thyself the Science of Self Awareness. And self awareness is the topic of today's conversation. We talk about the relevant neuroscience, the relationship between self knowledge and intelligence, the evolution of metacognition, error monitoring, theory of mind, mirror neurons, deception and self deception, false confidence, probabilistic reasoning, where metacognition fails, cognitive decline, those places where selfknowledge might be counterproductive, and other topics. Anyway, I found it quite interesting, and I hope you do as well. And now I bring you Steven Fleming. I am here with Steven Fleming. Steve, thanks for joining me. Thanks very much. It's an honor to be here. So you've written a very interesting book on perhaps the most interesting topic. The topic is self knowledge, self awareness. The book is know thyself the science of self awareness. But I'm really eager to talk about the whole sweep of this. But before we jump in, perhaps you can summarize your background academically and intellectually. Sure, yeah. So I'm currently a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, and I've always been interested in the sciences. I left high school without really knowing what I wanted to do, wanted to be a musician. So I didn't apply to university like all my friends were doing. And instead I took a year off back then and worked in an office job. And it was while I was commuting that I started reading popular science books on cognitive science. That's partly why I was also so interested in writing one myself when I got the opportunity. And interesting, just found it absolutely fascinating. I had, like, no idea that there was a science of the mind out there. We didn't get exposed to that at school, at high school. So I then became fixated on doing experimental psychology. I went to Oxford, and I was lucky there to have as a tutor a guy called Paul as a party who works on blind sight, this bizarre neurological condition of consciousness. And it was Paul who convinced me that there was a real rigorous science out there of consciousness and that it was possible to do good neuroscience on this. And I then went on to University College London to do a PhD in neuroscience. And that was co supervised with the psychologist Chris Frith and the neuroscientist Ray Dolan, both great people. I haven't met either, but I've obviously read their papers. Yeah, no, it was a fascinating time. And in Ray's lab, he was focused on studying decision making, reinforcement learning models. And in my PhD, I mostly focused on using brain imaging to study decision making. But on the side I was continuing to kind of have this off on love affair with consciousness, which has kind of continued with me now. And I guess towards the end of my PhD, I realized we could start applying some of the tools of decision making research to also study how we make secondorder decisions, so how we think about and reflect on how we're performing on various tasks. And that's what psychologists refer to as metacognition or thinking about thinking. At the time there was a long tradition in psychology of studying this topic, but very few people were working on the neuroscience of metacognition. And I had the opportunity, in a sense, to get in on the ground floor of that. And we ran a couple of early brain imaging studies looking at the relationship between prefrontal function and metacognition. I then went off to New York to do a postdoc at NYU to learn how to build computational models of metacognition and then in 2015 moved back to London and UCL, where I now lead my own research group studying metacognition and consciousness. Nice. Well, we should dispense with one possible source of confusion at the outset because I'm not sure how familiar you are with my work, especially on the topic of mindfulness meditation, the nature of the self. I'm someone who's given to say at fairly regular intervals that the self is an illusion or at best a construct. At bottom, it's not what it seems, but that's a very specific use of the word self. And when we talk about self awareness, I think we're talking about something that is far more capacious than the sense of subject object perception, which is really the linchpin of the self that I would argue that mindfulness ultimately reveals to be illusory. So we're talking about the whole person much more often than we're talking about the sense that there's a subject in the head independent of experience. So when we're talking about self awareness, this is not in violation of anything I have said about the status of the the selfish subject in in other contexts. And I'm happy to talk about the self with you as well, but I just wanted to try to clarify that for people because there's going to be something I can hear in the heads of many listeners. If the self is an illusion, what could we possibly mean by self awareness? Well, self awareness extends to everything else we can reflect on and be aware of in a kind of second order way that relates to our experience, our performance errors, the thing that we just experienced a moment ago lapses in memory. Let's just dive into the topic. How do you describe metacognition at this point? Yeah, no, I think that's a really useful background to have in place because I am talking about something distinct here to the philosophical notion of self, which is a complex object. And here I'm talking about something more practical, something more functional, which is this capacity to be aware of our traits, our skills, our personalities, our behaviors, and in some sense see ourselves like others see us. And we can study this in various ways. We can look at in very simple tasks how people realize they've made errors or how they're able to estimate their confidence in their skills and abilities and so on. And it's something that we often, I think, just take for granted. But the reason I find it so fascinating is because when you think about it for a moment, it is a kind of bizarre and wonderful feature of the human mind that we can, in some sense, think about how our own minds are working. And this has very practical consequences. So the reason we write a shopping list when we go shopping is because in some sense, we realize that our memory is not going to be good enough to hold all those items in mind. And similarly, when we start to realize our site is failing, for instance, it's not because we think the outside world has become blurry. It's because we realize that there's something in our perceptual systems that needs fixing with new glasses and so on. So it's this kind of practical, reflective thought that's not always obvious from the outside, but it's something that we can study with the tools of psychological science. Yeah. And one thing is increasingly clear is that other people, and now even algorithms, can know what we're like better than we can, certainly on specific topics. I remember a friend once told me a story from a board meeting where he was engaged in a very stressful conversation with the group, and someone in the meeting commented on how emotional he was getting, and it just seemed like they might want to take a break. And he denied being overly emotional. And someone around the table suggested that he bring his attention to the sensations at his upper lip. And the moment he did that, he burst into tears. Wow. Apparently his lip had been quivering as though he was about to burst into tears, and it was noticeable to those in the room. And you can imagine just how much can be known about any one of us now based on our Google search history, say, or anything we do with our attention online. And when you look at the database of knowledge, that is the profile of each of us that is accruing somewhere in the cloud. And what might be gleaned from that, when you compare it to everything else, every other profile of every other person, just the statistical knowledge there and the capacity to predict the next thing we'll find. Captivating that's exactly what you said. To take the view of oneself that another person could have opens the door to sometimes mortifying, at minimum, interesting facts that are not necessarily visible or salient when one is simply living one's life and having one's experience. Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting the example you mentioned of the person in the boardroom, because I I feel like I have, through studying metacognition, I've become more attuned in my own life to how I might have this fading out of self awareness at certain moments. And it's something that my wife has said to me on occasion when things are stressful with grant applications or whatever, that I just become a horrible person to live with for a few days at a time. And I used to deny this completely. I was like, I don't feel like anything's changing my behavior. And I now come to realize that how could I have possibly known at that time? I mean, there's a whole interesting story there about stress and how it is detrimental for metacognition itself. So you have this kind of paradoxical situation where the times when you might need to be aware of how your behavior is becoming causing problems for others, those are the times when metacognition and self awareness might actually be most impaired. But I have definitely, I think, become a bit more willing to accept in my own life that those fade outs of self awareness can happen. And they do happen probably more often than I'd like to admit. And I then have this stronger tendency to trust what, say, my wife is saying about my behavior and to try and correct it accordingly. Yeah. So let's build up this picture of metacognition. The simplest or most common definition I think one encounters is the phrase knowing that, you know, right? There's the knowing of things. There's the cognition piece, and then there's the self awareness that you have the knowledge. And this extends to knowledge in all of its forms, semantic knowledge. If you ask me, could you name more than four states in the United States? I could say yes to that. I could be sure about my knowledge there without actually going through the exercise of listing any states. So I have this more abstract understanding that my knowledge bank contains at least four state names. And so it is with so much of what we know, and of course, we can be wrong about that. We can actually think. We could produce specific concepts or memories and when asked, actually fail. But generally speaking, there's a representation of what is in our storehouse of knowledge that doesn't require us to actually go into the storehouse in order to cash it out in that moment. And so it is with even procedural learning or motor memory. So do you know how to ride a bike? Could you raise your hands over your head. We'd be surprised to have our confidence about that disconfirmed if we tried. But it's how would you build up the layers of what we're calling metacognition here? What is it beyond this representation to oneself that one knows certain things? Yeah, I think that's a very nice way of thinking about it, this notion that there are representations that go beyond knowledge. And one analogy that I sometimes use, it's not a perfect one because it's not how things actually work. But you can think of metacognition as in some sense being like the index of a book and the index usually points you to the right page in the book. But if the index maker has got things wrong and the book's self knowledge has in some sense failed, then sometimes there will be an index entry that does not correspond to the actual text in the book. And I think we can start to build up a picture of how metacognition works by thinking of the brain as effectively a hierarchical system and that it does not only encode information in memory, it does not only perceive and represent things at a first order level, but it also has what we think of as higher order representations. And we think parts of association cortex like prefrontal and parietal cortex are important for this, that it builds representations at a more abstract level of how the system is working. And I think that's probably the best way of conceptualizing metacognition at a cognitive systems level that we have at the moment. And then we can obviously take this in many different directions in terms of specific topics within that broader umbrella term of metacognition and how does it interact, if it interacts at all, with the variable of intelligence. I think there is an initial intuition that we have that intelligence is in some sense allied with having good awareness of what we know and don't know. But as ever, it turns on our definition of intelligence and empirically what we've found, perhaps surprisingly in many of our studies, is that when we measure metacognition in the lab and maybe it's useful to say a few words about how we actually do that. So typically the way we can quantify your method cognition and put a number on it in a particular task is by asking you to assess your performance on a number of trials. So of the task. So we might give you a memory task and after every decision about whether this object was on the list that you were asked to remember or not, we'd ask you how confident you were about that choice. Or we might give you a task involving perceptual judgments and then ask you how confident you are about each choice. And the key thing we're interested in there is not only your performance on the memory and the perception task, but also how your confidence tracks your performance. So intuitively, if I have high confidence when I'm right and lower confidence when I'm wrong. That's what we call having good metacognitive sensitivity or metacognitive ability. And what we found in those studies, now we've done studies of thousands of people, is that performance on classical IQ tests is not a great predictor of metacognitive ability. And this lines up with some other work in using other measures of metacognition, like whether we tend to be fooled by initially intuitive answers without reflecting on them. So these are things like the cognitive reflection tests that taps into more system two than system one thinking. And again, there in the literature on that kind of test, it does seem to be independent of classical IQ measures. And I think one way of thinking about this on a very broad brush basis is that the kind of neural and cognitive resources that we bring to the table to solve reasoning problems, which is effectively what an IQ. Test is tapping into, those are distinct to, or somewhat distinct to the kinds of neural and cognitive resources involved in reflecting on our performance in those tasks, including potentially even in an IQ test. So you in theory, and we have done a little bit of this, you can measure someone's metacognition about their performance on a test of intelligence. So in a sense, both on a theoretical basis but also on an empirical basis, we think metacognition and IQ come apart in interesting ways. Yeah, you can see that metacognition and performance have to break apart because you would have perfect metacognition if you were confident that you had utterly failed to perform. If in fact you had utterly failed to perform, you could just go through life failing again and again. And as long as you're aware that it's just one failure after another, well, then your metacognition score is perfect. That's right. That's exactly right. And I say I kind of make the throwaway line in the book that metacognition is often most useful when we're doing stupid things because that's when we need to be aware of making errors. So, no, that's absolutely right. What picture do we have based on evolutionary psychology of metacognition? How do we think this might have evolved? And what are the benefits of being able to represent to oneself the likelihood that one has made an error or that's obviously only one slice of metacognition. But this second order reflection, how does this fit in the context of evolutionary psychology? So one starting point for getting at that question is to look at how and whether we share metacognitive capacities with other species. And there has been an interesting line of work for many years in comparative psychology looking at tests of confidence and uncertainty and error monitoring in animals. And the general picture there is that in many species you can have pretty sophisticated tracking of confidence, tracking of errors and so on. So there's been some lovely work in dolphins and monkeys and rats showing that they pass confidence tasks similar to the ones that we use with humans. But that, I think, is a type of metacognition that occupies a different space to explicit self awareness in humans. And the reason that we think that's the case is because when we look at child development in humans, that kind of implicit metacognition, the ability to track confidence and monitor errors, that seems to be in place relatively early in life. So there's been some beautiful and heroic studies done by Sid Kuida's lab in Paris showing that babies as young as twelve months, I think even younger than that in some of their studies, show signatures of error monitoring both in EEG activity and also in their persistence for searching for particular objects. So when you use their persistence of searching for a toy, for instance, as a marker of confidence, then you get all the same metrics of metacognitive sensitivity that you can get out of the adult data. Now, that kind of lower level ability to self monitor seems to be in place quite early in life in humans. But when kids become verbal and you then ask them about their confidence and about whether they know something or don't know something, then as I'm discovering at the moment with my two and a half year old, their metacognition is terrible. They think they know things they don't know, they fail to realize they need to ask you about something, and so on. So it's not until the age of around three or four that children start to gain this explicit self awareness of what they know and don't know. And we think that in studies in adult humans, that kind of more explicit level of self awareness is related more to theory of mind, or the ability to think about other people as well as to think about ourselves. So I'm not sure if that answered your question, but hopefully it got us started along that line. Yeah, well, that does neatly differentiate us from other animals, even other primates. When you imagine that a comprehensive awareness of our own mind is of a piece with what we call theory of mind, it goes by other names like mind reading and mind sight. But it's the ability to represent the mental states of others such that you can recognize that other people can have rather often different beliefs and desires and expectations than you do, and they can be at odds with what is in fact true of the world. Obviously, the famous test of this is to set up a little playhouse with some dolls and ask kids around the age of four, one doll leaves the room, and then another doll hides a cherished object somewhere in the playhouse. And then you ask the kid, when this other figure comes back, where is he? Or she going to look for the object? It's only once they can develop the concept of another person holding a false belief that they can give the correct answer, which is he's going to believe it was where he where it last was before he left the room. So yeah, remind me, while there's some possible basis for very rudimentary theory of mind in other primates, I mean, I think there's some something like deception. It's not the it's it's still somewhat controversial to call it deception. Right. I think we still don't think that other primates have a proper theory of mind. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, it's an evolving field. And in fact, only in the past two or three years have there been studies suggesting that chimpanzees can represent false beliefs, at least to the extent of being able to shift their gaze towards where the object is actually going to be sorry. To where the object will they think the object will appear from the perspective of the other person. But so far at least and I was reading a review on this recently from Laurie Santos and colleagues, and so far at least, the picture is that even though if you use clever experimental techniques, you could get some hint that they can track false beliefs, at least in behavior, in terms of being able to act upon those and use those to guide behavior. It seems like there is a gulf there. From the best experiments on chimps to humans, there's quite a gulf. And this is not human adults. This is, as you say, kids age around four. And what's really interesting there is that if you go back that field of research, that field on animal theory of mind, was kicked off by this famous paper back in the 70s, which just had the title of does the Chimpanzee have a Theory of Mind? And going back to that paper, what the authors of that paper meant by theory of mind was the ability to think about other people's mental states, but also the ability to think about your own mental state. That term theory of mind has kind of got used most often in the literature to be about other people. What's interesting now, I think, with this rise of work on metacognition, is that we're starting to think, okay, maybe this is just a more general computational capacity that subserves not only thinking about other people, but also thinking about ourselves. Yeah, this is really interesting. This is a place where it does at least make a point of contact with the self that I often denigrate as illusory, and that there's this sense that our sense of our representation of ourselves in social space and in the world is of a peace with our concrete representation of others as others. Right. That this really indelible sense of self and other emerges together, kind of a single cognitive brushstroke. And when as many people kind of test in, you know, experiences in meditation and with psychedelics, when that boundary between self and other erodes, it erodes again. It's kind of a single boundary where if you're not really reaffin self. You're not quite reifying other in quite the same way in the normal course of events where we feel like ourselves and surrounded by other minds. It does seem intuitive to me that we're doing something quite similar when we're representing other minds and reflecting on our own. It's just we're thinking about the same kinds of things and it's the angle of our gaze that is different. But this goes to many other results in neuroscience. When you think of the mirror neuron research and just how is it that we interpret the behaviors of others? When you see someone reaching for an object you have you understand their intention in a way that maps on to what it's like to be you doing more or less the same thing, reaching for objects of that kind. There's a kind of mirroring component here in the way we understand other people's behaviors and it is the research thus far. I think it's appropriate to be somewhat skeptical of just how much has been made of the mirror neuron research, but it certainly seems that there is a kind of stealth mapping that is the basis for our understanding the behavior of others. Yeah, I think there seems to be a lot of circumstantial evidence surrounding that linkage. It's really hard to pin it down. And what I find fascinating and somewhat frustrating is can we cash that out in a more computational terms? Like what is that system really actually doing? Assuming it is a system that is, as you say, building a model of someone else and also building a model of ourselves. But it does seem like that similar brain networks are involved. And we recently did a meta analysis of all the studies of brain imaging studies of metacognition and compared that to classical theory of mind networks and there was interesting overlap in regions of the medial prefrontal cortex. And we know, for instance, in neurodegenerative diseases like dementia, decline in selfawareness is often accompanied by a decline in social cognition as well. And developmentally they seem to go hand in hand in children. So there's a lot of kind of there does seem to be a symmetry there and I'm attracted to that symmetry. I just think it's hard to find a good way and we are thinking of trying to do this, but it's hard to find a good way of directly comparing the kind of computations that might underpin self and other evaluation. Yes, we've just discussed that theory of mind is the necessary precursor for deception because it's not until you understand that other people have beliefs and representations that you can then manipulate those beliefs and representations strategically with an awareness of that this is a likely way to produce a desired effect in their behavior. But then there's this question of self deception, which again is a somewhat controversial topic scientifically. There are paradoxes that await us when we try to think of self deception as being truly analogous to the deception of others, because then you're left with this quasi Freudian picture of part of you consciously deceiving some other part of you. So the part of you that is in the deception business must know the truth in order to strategically hide it or distort it for the rest of you. How do you think of self deception or the phenomenology of being flagrantly wrong about one's inner life or outer behavior in ways that invite this analogy to deception, we do often summarize it as self deception or willful ignorance. I mean, the willful part of it is perverse and inscrutable from a cognitive point of view. Where does that fit into the discussion of metacognition? Yeah, it's interesting in terms of how that might connect to this notion of belief decoupling from accuracy or confidence decoupling from performance, because I think that is something we do see routinely in many studies. People's metacognition isn't very good. They are sometimes confident that they've got the right answer, even though it's clearly wrong. And we know that there are all these biases in belief and confidence that people like Daniel Kahneman have famously documented. I think that one place it connects there to the discussion we were just having on theory of mind is that we model or we create narratives to explain the behavior of others. That's part of the depth of mental state inference that we can do that. We can say, well, they must have ignored me in the street because of what I did yesterday, or something like that. There's a kind of like a narrative that we create about the thought processes going on in other people's heads, and we seem to create a similar self narrative and that can hear more or less with reality. And when it decouples completely, then we're in the realm of psychosis or confabulation. So I think that there are we can start building up a story about why beliefs or narratives might decouple from what is the ground truth of our behavior or how we appear to others. What I think is really interesting about your question that I hadn't really thought about before is that does that then, in some sense require a system to also know the truth internally? And it's not clear to me that that is the case, although I think it could be possible that that is the case in some circumstances. So we've done a bit of work. This was work led by a former postdoc of mine, Dan Bang, who has been really interested in this problem he calls private public mapping, which is effectively, how do we take our private beliefs and convert them into what we say to others? And so his example of this is, what do you say to a kindly aunt who's given you a terrible Christmas present and you don't want to hurt their feelings, so you say an untruth, but you do this strategically. And we studied that in. The context of metacognition by being able to track, using brain imaging, the confidence that was being formed at any given moment, because we have a fairly good understanding now of the neural correlates of confidence in individual decisions. But then we required subjects to strategically adjust the confidence they communicated to their partners in a collaborative game. And what we found was that there were distinct networks involved in this private sense of confidence. How do I feel about my performance now? And another part of the prefrontal cortex was engaged when they had to strategically adjust that to communicate to the other person. So that would be not quite deception, but it's some kind of strategic mapping between this kind of private feeling of what's going on and what we're trying to communicate to others for the purposes of strategic manipulation. So it would be super interesting to know whether we're at some level doing that to ourselves, that at some sense, that same general circuit for strategic manipulation of others is also working under the hood for ourselves. And I don't know of any work on that. Yeah, well, when you look at the structure of much of our thought, it is conversational. I mean, we are talking to ourselves much of the time as though there's someone in us who is listening, who needs to be told certain things. Otherwise much of our discursive thought is totally superfluous. Why does part of you say anything to the rest of you as though the rest of you isn't aware of the thing that's being said? If I'm looking for an object on my desk and when I spot it, I might say, oh, there it is to myself silently with the voice of the mind. But if I'm the one to see it, who am I telling? Oh, there it is. Who needs that further linguistic information when the one who is in possession of the eyes that have seen it is looking at it in that moment? And so, so much of our thought is dialogical that one could imagine a similar process is happening. The thoughts are tumbling out our mouths when we're speaking to others, and then when we shut our mouths, we keep talking to ourselves about more or less everything. Yeah, and I'm I'm very attracted to the position that Chris Frith holds on this, that in a sense and this comes back to the conversation about an evolutionary story of metacognition, that why did we start building this self narrative, this metacognition? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, just a brief announcement here. I have a new book coming out. It publishes August 11. It is available for preorder now on Amazon, and this is the first volume related to the podcast. It is called Making Sense conversations on Consciousness, Morality and the Future of Humanity. And in it, we've taken some of the best conversations from the first 200 episodes of the podcast and refined them for print. I edited my side of the conversation, the guests edited theirs. So this was an interesting opportunity to make sure we had said exactly what we wanted to say on the topic at hand. So for those of you who'd want to revisit some of these conversations and see them in their final form, the book is available. And for the people in your life who haven't figured out how to listen to podcasts, this would be a great way to share some of the more interesting conversations I've had here with them. These are the conversations I had with Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, David Deutsch, Daniel Conneman, David Krakauer, glenn Lowry, thomas Messinger, Robert Sapolski, anil Seth, timothy Snyder and Max Tegmark. Anyway, enjoy that. And that's it for housekeeping. As you know, I recently did a podcast on racism and police violence, and then I went on to the cheerful topic of existential risk. My next podcast is going to be on the ongoing threat of nuclear war. So it is a grim season on the podcast, but today there's a spot of sunlight, because today I'm speaking with Scott Barry Kaufman about human well being. Scott is the author of the book Transcend the New Science of Self Actualization. Scott is a humanistic psychologist who is taught at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and elsewhere. He writes the column Beautiful Minds for Scientific American, and he hosts the Psychology Podcast. He's also written for The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review, and his previous books include Ungifted Wired to Create Twice Exceptional, which he edited. And he also edited the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence. Anyway, we cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the difference between intelligence and creativity. We talk about wisdom and transcendence, the history of humanistic psychology, maslow's, hierarchy of needs, the connection between wellbeing and ethics, self esteem, psychedelics and meditation, peak and plateau experiences, mortality, salience, the pretrans fallacy, fear of uncertainty, work and meaning, intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards, pathological altruism, intimacy versus belonging, two aspects of self transcendence and other topics. I now bring you Scott Barry Kaufman. I am here with Scott Barry Kaufman. Scott, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me on your show, Sam. So you've written a fascinating book titled Transcend the New Science of Self Actualization. And you also have a podcast of your own, the psychology podcast, maybe. Let's start with just an introduction to your background in psychology. What sorts of issues have you focused on and how do you describe your work at this point? Sure, I think we have lots of mutual interests. When I first started off, I got my PhD in cognitive science and cognitive psychology and was really interested in the cognition of intelligence. And I started off in real traditional intelligence research, so studying IQ testing. And I was absolutely fascinated with what are the cognitive processes underlining intelligence and IQ. And then it branched off a little bit to other forms of cognition, like in pussy learning and unconscious learning. And I was curious if unconscious learning was related to conscious learning and whether it was such a thing as unconscious intelligence that would correlate or not correlate with IQ. And that's what my dissertation was on. And then it moved on to creativity work and understanding the distinction and similarities between intelligence and creativity. And then in the past four or five years, I've really gotten into positive psychology and humanistic psychology and trying to understand above just our mind and human intelligence. But how can we realize our our whole being, you know, not just one slice of us? You know, I want to focus mostly on the humanistic and positive side of things and talk about self transcendence and the furthest reaches of human wellbeing, but maybe we can take a moment to tie it to some of your earlier work. How would you differentiate intelligence, creativity, and wisdom? How do you think about those things? Yeah, it's a great, great question. So intelligence I view as the we can just really shorthand it and say it's the ability to apprehend and perceive what is. And when I got into imagination research, I defined imagination as the ability to apprehend and perceive what could be. And so I actually view creativity as a combination of intelligence and imagination. So creativity is having the ability to apprehend what is and really learn and understand the real, true nature of the world without any prior beliefs or biases. But we have to go beyond that for creativity. We also have to have that foresight into what society could be, what could humans become? And I see creativity as a combination of both intelligence and imagination. Does that make sense? Creativity is somewhat paradoxical, it seems to me, because if you're too creative, right, if you're not obeying any of the rules, well, then it suddenly becomes worthless or next to worthless like you're, you're extracting meaning that either isn't there or is there only for you. Right? But it can't be communicated to others. And so this is sort of where the psychedelic experience can become obviously not normative and not all that useful, even though and I hope we'll talk about psychedelics as well. But how do you view yeah, how do you view the rule following and rule breaking with respect to creativity? One of the key aspects of creative people? And I did a research project when I was working on this book with the journalist Kyle and Gregoire. The book is called Wired Decree. And when I was working on that, I was trying to look to see what a creative people do differently. And one of the most obvious things they do differently is that they do things differently. You know, they creative people are rule breakers in the sense that maybe they're not necessarily provocateurs and that's a different kind of rule breaking. And I think it's actually important to distinguish between those who are intentional, I would say compulsive rule breakers versus those who do it as a means to an end for greater meaning and creative realization. So then where does wisdom come in? Okay, wisdom has been defined in lots of different ways in the psychological literature. It's been defined not just psychological literature, but throughout the course of human history. But in my book Transcend kind of that's the climax. That's where we end up in understanding what wisdom could mean from a self actualization perspective or a transcendence perspective. And I view wisdom as really encompassing this dichotomy transcendence that one of my favorite psychologist, Abraham Maslow, talked a lot about. He said at the highest state of consciousness, lots of dichotomies that everyone else in our society is really interested and obsessed with. And these false dichotomies, we are able to transcend them in some way and we're able to see how everything is just part of a larger whole. This might even have to be to make it concrete. It could be like the distinction between selfishness and and altruism. You know, at the highest level of consciousness, if you're and being the highest level of motivation, if you are selfish in the sense that you're getting really enjoyment out of what you're doing, but you are also connected to the world and your enjoyment brings enjoyment to others. Simultaneously, the word selfishness starts to lose meaning. Evil versus good. You start to have a more realistic understanding of human nature and you on the one hand can recognize the human frailties, but you also have the capacity to see that there's good in humans. So dialecticals wisdom to me is really this ability to hold seemingly incompatible things in your head as well as with yourself. Recognize your own contradictions and zoom out on yourself and see all those contradictions as part of an integrated whole that could be integrated. My gosh, if you can find a way to take all these warring factions that exist within ourselves, we were evolved to be that way. There was no unitary system that through the course of human evolution that tried to make sure that we were integrated. Humans. Oh, my gosh. These humans who exist, who can work towards integration and feeling inner wholeness to some degree, those are very wise people, in my opinion. Yeah, well, so let's talk about your book and how you sort of scale that mountain where wisdom is the place one hopes to arrive. Why has positive psychology and humanistic psychology and the various branches that I'm not sure how stable these labels are now, but why has the positive side of the human experience traditionally been given such little attention in psychology? I mean, I know that's changed of late with Seligman perhaps, you know, first in in my lifetime, but and, you know, as you show in your book, we had people like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers and other people who went by the label humanistic psychology struggling to focus on this. And is it a legacy of what Freud did to our thinking about the prospects of human happiness? How do you view that the last century or so of psychology's emphasis on all that is wrong with the human mind, or potentially wrong and basic ignorance of the possibility of things going right with the mind? Well, I long believe that we should have listened to William James and not Freud. We should have listened to, in some senses, the originator of research psychology or empirical data psychology. A lot of Freud's ideas were very armchair and were, ironically, projections of his own soul, so to speak, or his own issues, projecting that onto all of humanity. But you ask a very good question because humanistic psychology was quite popular in a ten to 20 year period, in fifty s. Sixty s. It caught the time of Hippies, the sort of spirit of the LSD and the Beat writers, all this sort of idea of creativity and spirituality. It was it was part of the culture. And I try to think why it died out, because it did die out from, like, the 70s till Martin Seligman really brought it back in a big way by putting positive psychology on a scientific foundation in 1998 or so. And what happened between the well, you know, there's lots of ways of trying to answer that question. One way is recognizing that the bad is stronger than the good. We are more focused on when we have deprivations, and there's certainly no shortage of deprivations among humans to work on. Depression, anxiety. These things become more pressing concerns for us when we're in that deprived state. If we're feeling satisfied, we don't seek a therapist so that we are even more satisfied. I mean, if you go to a therapist and you say, doc, I only feel average life satisfaction, but I want to be like these pops psychology. You find something else. You find a coach, maybe, or you don't go to a therapist for that. Not clinical psychology. Not psychology. You know what I'm saying? So the bad is stronger than good in a lot of ways, and it isn't important a purpose of the field of psychology, the state admission of the APA. And what I think psychology should be about is improving human life. And improving human life. Like I said, there's no shortage of suffering, so that can take up a lot of it. So, yeah, I don't know the exact answer to that question, but I think part of it is connected to the spirit of the times in the we don't really have that 60s spirit right now, do we? Yeah, well, the 60s died in various ways, and for some reasons, it makes sense. I mean, there there was a an explosion of dysfunction in addition to all the enthusiasm and insight, there was a fair amount of dysfunction and chaos being advertised. And it's just you know, I'm a big proponent of the wise use of psychedelics, as you probably know, but the haphazard use of them obviously comes with its significant risk, and that risk was borne out in many people's lives. I had another thought, and that's that they're definitely outside of psychology, there was no lack of the Tony Robbins of the world or books on how to be your best self, how to realize your potential. So outside of psychology, in the pop help and I wonder if to a certain extent, the field of psychology, which likes to see himself as a physics, like a science, at least a lot of psychologists do, we're really put off by that world and wanted to distinguish itself from we're not self help woo woo. We're more scientific. And I just wonder if that has part to do with it as well. Yeah, I think it does. And also the explicit religious and Eastern influence on humanistic psychology. And I know we'll get into this, but people like Maslow were influenced by teachers like Krishnamurti or Buddhist writers like Alan Watts. And the sort of brain trust for this movement, positive psychology before it called itself positive, would often meet at places like Esplan Institute. And, you know, that became a hub for the New Age, and it gathered all of these influences, some of which are really the antithesis of science. I once taught a weekend at Esplan a long time ago, but simultaneous with that, I'm sure there were things in the catalog like how crystals can balance your chakras and the sky is the limit in terms of what people will believe in the Esoteric vein, whether Eastern or Western, in its influence. And it has much more in common with traditional religion than it does with scientific rigor. And so the stink of the New Age on all of this is probably what academic psychology is, is reacting to as well. I think that's right. And that stigma is still there. Sometimes when you say you do research and positive psychology, there are some sectors of psychologists that look down on that as maybe not as scientifically rigorous. Right. Okay. So now people have heard of Maslow if they haven't really heard of him as a person or even humanistic psychology, most people have heard of his hierarchy of needs. And this is one of these exports from somebody's work that got somewhat falsified in the transit to the rest of culture. So what is it that people think they know about this pyramid? And what is it that Maslow thought he was teaching about it? Well, a lot of people may have seen the pyramid. They may not even heard the name Abraham Maslow, but certainly they've they've seen it on the Internet, maybe diagrammed as a pyramid with, like now you see toilet paper at the bottom of the pyramid, or in the age of COVID or WiFi, battery was popper before that. It's a meme. And suggesting there's different levels of needs. Some are more foundational than others. And Maslow's original theory, he never drew a pyramid in his writings. I mean, I was looking through the writings, I was like, where's the pyramid? Where's I couldn't find a pyramid? And he was talking about a hierarchy of pre potency. We have some needs that are more prepotent over others, that when they're deprived, they take up more of our attention, and we really focus all of our energy and resources to satisfying that. So he argued at the base, although it's not perimeter, but our most pre potent need, I should say, is the physiological needs, like food, shelter, water. And then the next prepotent need is the need for love and belonging, according to Mazlo. And then the next pre potent need is the need for esteem, esteem from others as well as self esteem. And then the argument was, if we could have these needs, these basic needs met, then we can really be free to self actualize, to become all that we're uniquely capable of becoming. All of those basic needs are things that we share with other animals and we also share with other humans. So it doesn't make you particularly special if you say, I'm lonely or I'm hungry or I want respect, stand in line. Everyone wants respect. But if you start to say something like, I can play a violin concerto like no one else in the world can play a violin concerto. Now we're starting to talk about self actualization. What is this unique core potentiality within you that can make the greatest positive impact on the world? And that's what I think he meant by self actualization. That's the original theory. But there was no pyramid. He actually made it very clear that life wasn't like this kind of video game. He never used that metaphor. But I use that metaphor in the sense that you don't reach one level of need, like the need for belonging. And then some voice from above is like congrats. You've unlocked the need for esteem and then you can go up a level and then you never have to worry about connection ever again. He made it very clear that life is always a two step forward, one step back dynamic, where we're always choosing growth, we're always trying to choose growth, but the fear response is always pre potent fear is always going to loom over us and uncertainty, but we have to consciously keep choosing the growth option. He made that very clear. And then it's germane to this idea that we're both interested in with transcendence. He argued the last couple of years of his life that self actualization wasn't the highest motivation in his hierarchy of needs, that there was a higher motivation. In fact, he realized that there were different types of self actualizing people. This is an insight he wrote in a personal journal entry of his that I found. He's like, big insight today. I realized that there are actually different types of self factualizing people. There are self actualizers who are perfectly content going their entire lives realizing their own potential. And maybe they read all the books how to realize their full Potential. They're obsessed with realizing their potential and maximizing their potential, but they really don't care much about maximizing the potential of society or maximizing the potential of others. There's not a great connection between self and others. They may dazzle with their talents or at work. They may be doing good work, and they feel self actualized, but they're not what Mazzo called the transcenders. He argued that transcenders were a different kind of self actualizers who were consistently motivated by higher values. He called them the B values, the values of being itself, things where there's no means to an end, their ends in themselves, like the search for beauty, the search for justice, for meaningfulness in the world, for goodness. And you're motivated by these values, but also you're motivated by peak experiences in life. So these sort of spiritual, I guess, called transcendent experiences in your life and these transcenders, this is what they lived for. There's these kinds of experiences and the realization of these kinds of values. Yeah, that opens up a lot of interesting questions because many of us who are in the transcendence business have noticed that there's the connection between so called peak experiences or even more durable experiences of self transcendence, which do seem normative within their purview. They have beneficial effects psychologically. They mitigate psychological suffering. But the connection to ethics and commitment, to an intelligent commitment to helping other people, say, the kind of normative prosocial emotions in action that is I think it's there. It's certainly advertised to be there in Eastern context, especially in a Buddhist one especially. But it's not as direct or as reliable as I think we would hope and to testify to that fact. All you need to do is look at the careers of great meditators and teachers of meditation who have gathered students. Many of them have come from eastern countries and come to the west to teach. And this was obviously happening in in maslow's time. And so many of them have produced incredible suffering among their students and mixed messages, to put it charitably with respect to their teaching, because they become in many cases, we're probably talking about fraud. These people are not who they say they are. But in the most interesting cases, I don't think that is what's happening. I think we're talking about people who have genuine insights, genuine access to fairly rarefied states of mind. These are not people who are failed meditators or failed yogis. These are, again, to one degree or another, spiritual athletes, but who still have whatever level of narcissism and ego needs and just unfulfilled desires that lead them to misbehave, sometimes with the abandon of a rock star trashing a hotel room. And it's left many people thinking that there's no there there, which is a real integration of self transcending wisdom and ethics that survive the normal tests, free of paradox that strains one's sanity and actually just leads people to be good and reliably harmless in proximity to others. And so that, you know, I've come away from my collisions with this literature and to some degree, these people feeling that there's more needed in the toolkit for living a truly examined life and becoming a better person than just having certain self transcending experiences. Certainly I think the peak experience is the wrong model. Whatever the peak is, it comes, it goes. It's not the ultimate insight into the nature of consciousness that will transform you because by definition it came and it went. But what's needed is an actual conscious integration with ethics that makes sense. And this is where culture comes in and just the relationship between the individual and society, right? So yes, it's possible to have real breakthroughs privately in solitude, but when one comes out and interacts with the rest of the world, what one has to do that with are by definition one's beliefs, assumptions, one's culture on some level. And in the eastern case, you've had many of these people come from effectively theocracies with all of those norms and have used those norms as a template through which to interact with people. And that hasn't worked out so well. So anyway, I realize I've dumped a lot on you, but I guess I'm interested to know what you think about the larger footprint of wisdom and how it relates to things like self transcendence and peak experience and that general project of becoming a better person. Yeah, there's a lot there. And I spent a lot of time when I was writing this book thinking about pseudo transcendence. What does pseudo transcendence look like? Mazda actually talked about pseudo growth. He talked about people who tried to jump to the top of his hierarchy of needs without addressing their other needs, thinking that it'll somehow if they just meditate or if they just do LD or they do spiritual practices, then suddenly they won't have these abiding concerns anymore that they had. He called that pseudo growth. So in my book, I try to distinguish between pseudo transcendence and healthy transcendence. So everything so this is a framework which Mazda used, but I started to see the whole world in that way, everything. So nothing in and of itself is good or bad. Everything has a D flavor to it and a b flavor to it. So the D flavor is a deficiency motivated flavor to it. So you do it because you're trying to satisfy some hole in yourself in some way and anything can apply to that. You can have dehumor versus being or growth motivated humor, love. You can have belonging. You can have deep belonging where you have a desperate need to belong with others because you severely lack belonging and you're trying to change and control the world in some way. Or be belonging where you see people for who they are or be love for the being of others, not what use they exist to satisfy some whole in yourself. So I think the big key is recognizing that integration is what matters here. And I have a section in my book called The Hitler Problem. So when I get to the need for purpose, I ask, well, was Hitler self actualized? Because he clearly had a sense of purpose. He had a purpose. I'm arguing purpose is a higher level of need. The point here is that life is not like a mountain or a pyramid, like it's been depicted in Maslow's. I actually have a new metaphor sailboat. And in a sailboat model. The reason why I think it works, and I'd love to get your thoughts on that, is that it clearly shows that you need to have a safe and secure boat. Your basic needs need to be met. There's no holes in the boat, no severely deprived aspects of your needs, or else you won't go anywhere. You can't move in your desired direction when all you're focused on is securing the boat. And for the boat, I talk about the needs for safety, the needs for connection and the need for self esteem. But once our boat is secure, we can open the sail and we open the sail and face the vulnerability and the unknown of the sea. We move with purpose and direction with that sale, but we move with an integration of the spirit of exploration, not fear and love, universal love, or what Mazda called be love for the being of others. It's moving in that purposeful direction, but with an integration of these other things. So the whole point here is that we operate as a whole vehicle experiencing the unknown of the sea, even though we each move in our own direction with our own purpose. There can be a great unknown, great wave can come crashing down on all the boats at once. And then suddenly we were all moving our own direction, and now we realize, wait a minute, we're all actually in the same sea together. So I think this metaphor works in a number of ways better than the static pyramid. And also the pyramid doesn't show that the point here of wisdom is the integration aspect. So people who appear as though will tell you because they're gurus or that I'm a transcendent being and they go abuse people or do whatever, you see all these atrocities from people who say they're enlightened. Not all, of course, but the kinds you point out. I would argue that they're pseudo transcending. They have built their spiritual practices on a very faulty foundation. They still have deeply unresolved belonging needs, or deeply unresolved safety needs or steam needs. They desperately need a steam. And so it's built on a very faulty foundation. So that's why I think that this healthy transcendence model I talk about in the book, I specifically define as healthy transcendence is defined as the harmonious integration of the whole self in the service of realizing the good society. That's how I define healthy transcendence, to make clear that it's the connection between self and world not being above the world in some way. My conceptualization of transcendence might differ from other people's notions of transcendence, but I wanted to make it very clear that it wasn't a horizontal thing. It's not like we're transcending other people. In some sense, it's actually quite the opposite. Healthy transcendence is when we have this great unity with the world. Yeah, well, I think the sailboat analogy is really a good one. And I could see it break down at one point at the extreme end of transcendence, really, where the things that seem to be needs for most of us, certainly most of the time, which is things that are part of the whole. The deficiency needs the safety, the connection, the self esteem. It really is possible, or certainly seems to be possible to transcend those in some basic sense. Now, that's not really a norm you can recommend to other people. But it does seem like a way of resolving some of the paradoxes you mentioned that Maslow was focused on, or seeming paradoxes, or the dialectic between extremes where if in fact, it's possible to achieve the sort of mind that sees fame and shame as being equally empty. Right? Well, then one has to question just what this need for self esteem is really about in the end. You know, if seeing yourself reviled on Twitter can be as meaningless as seeing yourself praised on Twitter, you know, then you you've surmounted something there and it's not you're no longer vulnerable to the vicissitudes by which most people would define their their effort to secure self esteem. Or being in good standing with a community, say. And there are practices in the Contemplative tradition that explicitly target these opposites for this purpose, right? Like if you're a great meditator who thinks he's transcended his concerns about selfesteem, well, then your teacher may recommend that you do something that you would normally find just absolutely mortifying, just to see how you can inhabit that channel of human experience. Right? So you deliberately embarrass yourself or engage some way of life that reduces your status so that people begin treating you differently and you begin to feel what that's like and play with that mode of human experience. Many people have done even just school projects where you go out in a wheelchair even though you're not you don't need one, right? You just see what it's like to be in a wheelchair and have everyone think you are a paraplegic and treat you with all the weirdness that often evokes from people. There are many insights you can get from doing something like that, but the thing you begin to notice is just how vulnerable you normally are to the changes in affects and attitude and assumption that can happen just based on some very simple social cues. So apart from that, I guess we should talk about just how far this project of transcendence can likely go because there is almost certainly false advertising here born of thousands of years of quasi religious philosophizing unconstrained by science. But in my experience, the assumptions that most Westerners and most people it's not just Westerners at this point, make about the superficiality of the project of, let's say, learning to meditate. Those assumptions can be proven false in a variety of ways. And it's interesting that that's kind of a limiting factor on how people think about transcendence and its prospects. You said a lot of wise things there. I think it's really important to not treat these practices as Panacea's, right, as quick fixes. Mazda called them quick hits of transcendence. He was very much against that. He thought self actualization took a lot of work and he actually was very wary of psychedelics. Did he take psychedelics? No, he didn't. That's interesting. He was surrounded by people who were both the major researchers and proponents of psychedelics at that time. So he must have just decided based on some reasons why not to. What were those reasons? I don't remember encountering that in your book. Yeah, he used to rib a lot with Timothy Leary and there's a famous story of them walking together Harvard Square and Mazzle saying something like, would you want to take an elevator to the top of Mount Everest? So he was like teasing him about LSDs being a shortcut and Mazzle very much viewed it as a shortcut. And I read all these letters that he had wrote, personal correspondence to various people about his thoughts on LSD. But during that same conversation there was a time where I think they were exhausted from walking and Mazzo said, should we get a taxi or something? And then Timothy Leary kind of made fun of it as well. He said, I thought you said you didn't want any shortcuts anyway. That was funny kind of joking back and forth. But yeah, Mazzo really was trying to hold off on that because he really railed against these easy answers to self. He really viewed self accusation as being committed to a calling or something deep within yourself that you love that brings out the best in you and that you are committed to working towards day in and day out. Very much was in that sort of meaning mode similar to Victor Frankel. And there's some fascinating discussions between Victor Frankel and Mazda about meaning and there are similarities and differences about their way of thinking about that. But he really railed against it and he would kind of go back and forth. Like in his book on peak experiences in religion, he says something to the effect, well, I know psychedelics is becoming popular now and this may scientifically someday show to have benefits, but he was very tentative about it. I think if he were alive today and he saw the science and saw a lot of the positive benefits, I actually think he changed his mind a little bit and would be a bit more excited about it. Have you taken psychedelics? I haven't. I'm like Mazda. Yeah. So what's behind that? Well, I personally have always been prone biologically dispositionally to hypomania, which is not the same as manic and sort of bipolar. Actually hypomania is a personality trait that we all vary on. It's correlated with Schizotypy and this is actually what led into a whole rabbit hole of research I've been conducting on Schizotypi and its relationship to creativity and how in some sense it can be related to schizophrenia. But I've been really interested in that paradox of when does it tip over to schizophrenia versus when does it tip over into creative thinking. So I've just noticed in myself that I've been prone to this kind of like I can see beauty somewhere and then just start crying over it. And without psychedelics I'm kind of scared. I want to do it with someone that's a good guide or someone who's really experienced with it because I'm kind of scared of being high or kind of having this wonderful experience and then can you have too much of this kind of transcendent experience where it becomes overwhelming? Can you tell me? Yeah, you certainly can. And I think being I don't know much about hypomania, but I can imagine just wanting to be cautious. If you feel like there's something that if you have a concern that you could be destabilized in some way that wouldn't be healthy. Yeah, I think for instance, someone who has a greater than normal reason to worry that they might be prone to schizophrenia, that's a real I say this without any clinical experience. But just from what I understand of the literature that seems like a contraindication for certainly real psychedelics. I would leave MDMA aside but LSD psilocybin mescaline DMT I think you would be wise to at the very least be cautious there if there's any kind of clinical risk in the offing. For me, the utility of psychedelics, and I guess this does relate somewhat you wrote an article on Mindfulness that I also wanted to talk about and it relates to your take on meditation there. There are many reasons to take psychedelics, but for me, the one that applies to most people and I think the one that integrates most directly with this larger project of getting to Everest by the means of growth rather than the elevator that takes you up there and then you promptly die of exposure or hypoxia. It's that without having had certain experiences, you really have no sense of how limited your normal experience is. This is in terms of affect and cognition and the ethical implications of both. You just don't know how confined the prison of your mind is. Or even that it is a prison until one of the walls has been broken down for you and you've seen some vast horizon that you didn't even imagine existed. Or even if you did, even if you paid a lip service to the possibility, you just didn't know what it would be like to confront it. And I guess the analogy that works for me is to think of mental training and meditation as a species of that somewhat analogous to physical training. And physical training is obviously something, it's a thing we know it's uncontroversial that you can get stronger and more flexible and improve your balance and you can become an Olympic gymnast, right? And so everyone who begins working out does it in a context. They know that while they may not become an Olympic gymnast, they know just how far this can be taken. You know, when you're just struggling to touch your toes or do one pull up or one push up because you've been sedentary for the last ten years, you know that extraordinary transformations of the body are possible. And then the question is just how far are you going to take this? How dissatisfied are you going to be with your inability to do much of anything? And how inspired are you going to be by watching the Olympics or seeing pictures of people who have completely transformed their bodies? And the problem with the contemplative life and meditation and other tools is that the changes are for the most part invisible. It's not that they don't have emotional correlates and therefore behavioral ones and that's why the rampages of various gurus seem to be disqualifying the whole project. But for the most part this isn't an inner landscape and therefore a hidden one. And therefore all we have is the testimony of people to say how far this landscape actually goes. And so you can't see the gold medal floor exercise at the Olympics to prove beyond any possibility of doubt that it is possible to take the project of becoming stronger and more flexible and getting greater balance and all that. You can take it to a level of perfection that you wouldn't otherwise be able to imagine. Right? And so with psychedelics it's a little bit like suddenly being dropped into the gold medal routine of the floor exercise modulo. A few ways this analogy breaks down. It's not that everything you can experience on psychedelics is normative or worth getting by some other route. You can experience things that are terrifying and clearly not normative. But if you hit the sweet spot on LSD or Psilocybin or MDMA, again, not a classic psychedelic, but it shows you a different room in the mansion of understanding. If you hit any of those sweet spots that do within their purview seem normative. If you experience something like unconditional love on MDMA or you experience self transcending unity with nature. I'll say on Psilocybin, it is like experiencing physical perfection of a sort that only the most highly trained athlete would ever touch. And you're just dropped into it. And then you lose it again. You come down, but you realize, okay, that's possible. Even though you can forget it on a day by day basis, you have seen something that you know there's a there there and then the question is what are you going to do about it? And then meditation, if you take it up as a practice, can be practiced in the context of knowing that this is not a false project, right? Just knowing that when someone says they've had this kind of experience, you know, from within, that this is an actual potential of the human mind and therefore the human brain and there's no reason why it couldn't be a potential of yours given the right changes. So the virtue is, again, it's not the only virtue, but for me the primary virtue is almost rhetorical. It's the only thing that would have convinced a skeptic like me that there was a path to go anywhere. Really, that's its utility. Again, we could talk about other things that it does for people. But for me it is the perfect rejoinder to the otherwise necessary skepticism, which is, you know, because again, we're surrounded on all sides by bullshit. You know, things that are clearly bullshit and it's hard to find the diamond in the bag of glass. And, yeah, psychedelics can help you distinguish the two. Yeah, there's a lot there and I really enjoy listening to your experiences, I enjoy listening to other people's experiences. We can intellectualize this stuff as much as we want, but until we actually experience it we sometimes don't fully understand something to be the case. And I'm really impressed with the scientific research that's coming out on showing that psychedelics in combination with spiritual practices show the greatest effects like meditation, but also prayer. There's some new studies, large scale studies that show that the combination is better than either alone. So the more you can integrate those psychedelic experiences into the rest of your life the more productive it will be. But what's interesting to me though is that there's lots of different routes to this certain transcendent state of being. There's lots of different routes. I'm wondering psychedelics do you think there's nothing else practices that can take us to those same insights? What are your thoughts on that? It depends which insights and experiences you're talking about. It's a Venn diagram for me which in certain cases barely overlaps between what is the real purpose of meditation or the kinds of experiences people can have in meditation and really the essence of it, I mean the real utility of it and the kinds of experiences people can have on psychedelics. The way I distinguish them is that there's consciousness and it's contents and almost any attempt, successful or otherwise to change experience is a matter of changing the contents of consciousness. That is really the goal and whether it's thought about in those terms or not and that is the effect. And by definition all of these changes are temporary. So you can have a peak experience through taking psychedelics, you can have a peak experience through, you know, going on a meditation retreat and meditating for 14 hours a day for a month and these kinds of experiences can be pretty similar. The difference with psychedelics is you're guaranteed to have a radical change in the contents of your consciousness and it's guaranteed to happen more or less within the hour. Right? So it's like if someone gives you an effective dose of LSD or Psilocybin there's no question something's going to happen. Now it may be a terrifying something but if nothing else it will prove to you that experience is a highly plastic thing and it is possible to inhabit states of consciousness that you never dreamed were possible a mere hour ago. And again you can get there with meditation and you can get there in a much more orderly way without the downside. I mean some people can go crazy on a meditation retreat as well so it's not that there's no risk but it's not the same kind of spin of the roulette wheel where you're really not sure what you're going to get until you get it. All your attempts to control set and setting notwithstanding. So it is more orderly and it can go into very rarefied terrain. But the actual sweet spot for meditation, which is to say the transcendence that actually matters, is something that you can recognize about the nature of consciousness in any moment that's coincident with any contents. You don't actually need the pyrotechnics of the psychedelic experience or even the pyrotechnics of changes in state born of intense concentration and meditation to recognize this thing about the nature of consciousness. And you know, this thing is referred to by many names but it's cutting through the illusion of the self or recognizing emptiness or nonduality. I mean, there are many sort of facets by which you could talk about it but it's the loss of this sense of subject object perception and this is completely coincident with ordinary perception. You can drive a car in this state of consciousness. This is a perfectly functional state because it's not actually a state. This is the way consciousness is when you're no longer constructing this sense of being the center of consciousness to speak of it in representational terms. It's like you can represent the world without representing a subject in your head, in your body, in the world. Most people have this additional sense that there's a homunculus in the head that's doing the thinking and the feeling and the reacting and that can be taken offline. And how that relates to neurophysiology or what the default mode network is doing, I mean, that's an open question but based on the current literature, it seems like it's probably at least part of what the default mode network is doing. In addition to just producing mind wandering or daydreaming or just random thinking, there's a strain of thinking that is explicitly self referential. And and again, I don't know if this has actually been studied, but more than just self referential thought, there's the difference between noticing thought as an appearance in consciousness among all the other appearances and being identified with thought, which is to say thinking without knowing that you're thinking. And that's the subtlest entanglement with thought which does give this feeling of subject in the head being the thinker. And so meditation can break that spell and breaking that identification leaves everything else untouched. Now, it is in fact true that the more you do that and the longer those moments of true nonduality or perception of emptiness last, then that does begin to change the character of the contents of consciousness as well, right? So that can begin to seem more rarefied and more psychedelic and more dreamlike. That's where some of that explicitly mystical language can come into even this sort of discussion. But it's never the point and it's never the thing you're trying to maximize. And in fact, when you begin to practice in this nondual way, it's explicitly part of the instruction that you need to break your attachment to any of those changes in consciousness that you think are a sign of something good happening. I mean, this is where the bean mode versus the becoming mode or the bean mode versus the deficiency the deficiency mode, which isn't your terminology. That's where that emphasis as a matter of practice becomes the entire game, right? Which is if being is really the point, if you've recognized something about the nature of consciousness that cannot be improved, it neither admits of being improved or suggests that there's any need to improve it. And it's compatible with anything else that can be noticed as the contents of consciousness. It's compatible with noticing physical pain or an ugly thought or anything that might arise. Well then at that point it's not a matter of changing anything, it's a matter of continuing to notice this quality of consciousness which is its centerlessness, its openness, its clarity. And then anything that changes, I mean, the feeling of, you know, joy or the feeling of bliss, I mean anything that becomes for most people, certainly in the beginning of meditation, a sign that meditation is actually working. All of that gets disavowed as an appearance in a dream that is meaningless. It has no meaning at that point. The fact that you suddenly feel good, that's not the point of meditation. And in that sense, most of what people experience with psychedelics just the experience of being bowled over by incredibly intense and often very positive experience, right? Bliss and seeing colors of a sort, colors in the natural world that you never imagined possible, and a feeling that the energy of your body is inseparable from the energy of the world and the energetics of all of that. Whatever the knob is in the brain that somewhere near the nucleus accumbens that you can grab and turn up to eleven, well then it got turned up to twelve there. And none of that is ultimately the point. Right? None of that can be the point. And yet again, it's the thing that if you've never experienced it, you're someone who just can't imagine how different a human experience can be. And that lack of imagination becomes the reason why you are satisfied with Netflix and not hating your life. You get up each day and merely repeat that project. I don't know if that answers your question, but it gets somewhat paradoxical in terms of trying to equate what the project is from the point of view of meditation and the utility of psychedelics. Yeah, it was really elucidating. I really appreciate that. I'm trying to square that away from way with something you said earlier about you kind of were pushing back against when I said transcenders, they live for peak experiences. You were kind of doubtful or criticizing. That's a worthy project. You noted how peak experiences were so ephemeral, and yet now you're talking about you're advocating for these kind of LSD type experiences that are ephemeral only insofar as they can get you to be sufficiently interested in something deeper than what you're tending to experience by the happenstance of your own conditioning. Right? So we've all been conditioned by culture to think certain things are possible and to hope for certain outcomes in our lives. And we're continually having various states of consciousness advertised to us as desirable and take the hull of the boat that we're trying to shore up. We all have various self esteem needs, say, and needs for belonging and connection, and then the fulfillment of those needs get advertised to us and modulated by culture. So what does self esteem mean now? Well, it means something different than in the 1980s before anyone had even heard of social media or imagined that such thing was possible. Now it means something online and we're all trying to navigate the consequences of that. So I would say that the role of a peak experience, which, again, by definition, is going to come and go like every experience, is to convince you that there's more to the landscape of mind than you may have assumed, and which you're tacitly assuming by prioritizing the way you're spending your time and attention in the way that you are. Right? I mean, like, if you might not think that you have bounded the horizon of your aspirations so narrowly, but if you're spending more or less every moment of your life just trying to come out on the winning side of a skirmish on Twitter and eke out a few more publications and earn 50% more money than you did last year, right? Like if that is taking up 90% of a person's bandwidth, well, you know, embedded in that use of energy and attention are certain assumptions about what will be ultimately satisfying. And, you know, this is a very common experience. To arrive at the fulfillment of all of that, you make a little more money, you publish a little more, your snark lands appropriately on Twitter. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking with Bart ermin Bart is the author of more than 30 books, including the bestsellers Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus Became God. He's a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. He's been featured in Time and the New Yorker and the Washington Post and many other places. He's been on The Daily Show, he's been in many documentaries, and his most recent book is The Triumph of Christianity, and this details the history of how Christianity spread through the world. Bart, as you'll hear, is a former believer. He's now, I think he calls himself a diagnostic. At this point, though, that didn't come up. But we had a great conversation. This was really the full tour of what Christianity is as a belief system and how it got that way. I wanted to come at it as though from Mars and consider the whole doctrine as though I had never heard of it before. We did that and it was fascinated. We talked about his background as a born again Christian and then his loss of faith. Once he became a true scholar of the New Testament. I asked him what the most convincing argument in defense of Christianity is. We talked about the status of miracles. We spent some time talking about the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus and the nature of heaven and hell. We talk about the end times and biblical prophecy and about who Jesus likely was and who he thought he was. We focus on Paul as the most important apostle and then discuss how it was that he likely converted so many people to the faith. Anyway, I thought it was a very interesting conversation. Sometimes it's good to examine something that you're familiar with as though you've never seen it before, and that's what we do here. I now bring you Bart Irman. I am here with Bart Ermint. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So you have a fascinating new book, The Triumph of Christianity how Forbidden Religion Swept the World, which we will definitely talk about, I want to talk about, but it comes on the back of many books you've written about Christianity, and you have a very interesting story with respect to your own faith. And scholarship. So I just want to start there, which is not really the subject of your current book. For those listeners who don't know you, take us back to some of the crucial moments in your development as a thinker on this topic. What is your background religiously and where did you wander on the landscape of faith and doubt? Yeah, I know I'm a bit of an odd duck in the field of New Testament and early Christian studies because I'm a scholar of the New Testament. My PhD is a New Testament, but I'm actually not a Christian myself, and there aren't very many nonchristian scholars of the New Testament out there. I was raised Christian, though. I was raised in the when I was a kid, I was in the Episcopal Church and grew up fairly religious. When I was in high school, I had a bornagain experience and I committed my life to Christ. And that's how I got really interested in the Bibles, because I was religiously committed. Tell me more about that. What is a born again experience? We're going to talk about Saul and the road to Damascus that made him Paul. But what was your experience? So I was a church going Episcopalian and I started in high school attending a youth group that was not connected with the church, but was a very religious youth group. It was called a campus life youth for Christ. And the leader of this group was a 20 something guy who was very charismatic in his personality, who insisted that the only way to be a real Christian was to ask Jesus into your heart and to commit your life to him as your Lord and Savior. And so I decided I had to become a Christian. It wasn't clear to me what I was before that because I went to church every week. But this was sort of a personal commitment that somebody would make. And so being born again meant making this commitment. And then you were given a new life. Your old life was over, and now you began your life as a Christian. But was it merely a matter of deciding to do this? Did it entail some experience that seemed confirmatory of the belief structure? Was there was some evidence that came crashing down subjectively that seemed to verify the truth of the doctrine? Yeah. So the way it worked and still works in these circles is that it involves saying a prayer and making a personal profession to God of faith in Christ. And the confirmation is in a kind of feeling of elation where you have this kind of psychological moment of heightened emotion. And that is sort of the beginning confirmation that something's actually happened and you're a different person now. And so as a 15 year old, having only been born 15 years earlier, I was born again. Well, the liability here is at the level of epistemology is hard to ignore because what sort of group induction experience as a teenager wouldn't produce a feeling of elation. I mean, you could imagine so many other things being swapped in for Christianity there. Did you worry about this at the time, or was it just was the truth of the beliefs that you were taking on just kind of baked into you based on your background? Yeah, no, I didn't worry about it a bit. For many years, I was convinced that I knew the truth and that if somebody wanted to have eternal life, they had to also know this truth. And there was one truth, and it was rooted very much in an understanding of the Bible, that the Bible was the revelation from God, and one had to commit oneself to the truth of the Bible in order both to know God and to have eternal life. And anyone who didn't accept this message was destined to the fires of hell forever. So you would have called yourself an evangelical at that point. Does anyone call themselves a fundamentalist, or is that a word of appropriate spoken by secularists who don't agree with them? Well, not just secularists. Fundamentalism tends to be the term be used for the guy who's to the far right of you, even in Christian circles, you have a lot of Christians who talk about fundamentalists, and what they mean by that often is somebody who's sort of rapidly conservative. But I'll say when I went off to college, I went to a fundamentalist Bible college. And we were somewhat proud of the term fundamentalist because for us, it meant that we subscribed to the very fundamentals of the faith. And there were other Christians who were more liberal in their orientation who didn't accept even the very fundamentals. And so we considered ourselves to be fundamentalists in what we thought was a positive sense that we held to the essential elements of the Christian faith. Yeah. Wasn't it originally a coinage of Moody Bible college? No, I'm not sure where it originally started, but I think it actually started later than Moody started. Moody started in the late 19th century, and the term fundamentalist became a big deal in the 1920s when there was a split in several denominations over issues such as was there a literal virgin birth, or is the Bible inerrant in all of its wording or not? With conservatives saying, yes, it's inerrant, and, yes, there was a literal virgin birth, and other Christians saying, no, not so much. And so it divided into fundamentalists and liberals. Okay, so take me forward from there. So you're 15. You're now a fundamentalist Christian. You believe presumably a whole raft of doctrines, and now you're becoming, at some point, more of a formal student of the faith. What did your academic background begin to look like? So, in high school, I was very active on the high school debate team, and I was very involved in debate. And when I was graduating from high school, I had to decide whether I'd go on to Kansas University to be on the debate team or to go off to a Christian school and further my understanding of the Bible. And I ended up following the latter path. This 20 something fellow who is the head of this youth group had gone to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and told me that if I was going to be a serious Christian, i, too would go to Moody Bible Institute. And so I did. I went to Moody Bible Institute, which was a three year degree program that focused on Bible and theology. And there my classes. My initial post high school education was taking classes. One semester I'd have a class on the Gospel of John and another on the Book of Hebrews and another on how to evangelize the pagans is all Christian kind of stuff. That always comes in handy. So did you start with the study of the relevant ancient languages at that point? No. When I was at Moody, I wanted to take all the Bible and theology classes I could. And even though I knew the importance of learning Greek for the New Testament, I didn't want to waste time doing that because I just wanted to master the Bible as well as I could. And so I took all my classes on the English text. But my first semester at Moody, I took a class on the Gospel of John. So the entire semester on this one book of the New Testament. And during this class, the guy who's teaching this class seemed really smart to me. He's really organized, and I thought, this guy is getting paid to do that. I want to do that. And so already as a 17 year old, I decided I wanted to become a New Testament scholar. So then you went to graduate school, still full of faith. When did your study begin to erode your conviction and the truth of the doctrine? Right. So Moody was a three year institution, and to get the bachelor's degree, you had to transfer somewhere else to get credits. And so I transferred to after Moody, I went to Wheaton College, which was Billy Graham's alma mater. And for me that was a step towards liberalism because they were not quite as fundamentalist as I was used to. That was fine. At Wheaton, for my foreign language requirement, I took Greek, ancient Greek, and it turned out I was pretty good at it. And so then I decided I wanted to do my graduate work dealing with the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, studying the New Testament in the original Greek language. And the world expert on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament was a man named Bruce Metzger, who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. And so when I graduated from Wheaton with a degree in English, I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary to further my education in Greek manuscripts. And then did that take you through your PhD. So I did a master's degree there, a three year master's degree. And then I applied and got into the PhD program. And so it was another four years getting my my PhD. And in the process, my first year of my master's program, I took Hebrew so I could read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, and I learned German so I could read what scholars in Germany had said in French, so I could read what scholars in France had said. And so I started getting involved in serious scholarship as opposed to simply memorizing the Bible or learning about the Bible. I was actually studying it in the original language. And that was largely what led me away from fundamentalist Christianity. Well, so before we talk about the epiphanies you had that led you to doubt or the various stages of doubt, take me back to before that moment. And at that time, if we had met you at your most educated with respect to the Bible but also full of faith at that point, what would the young Bart Erman have said is the most convincing argument in favor of Christianity? I would have said that historians can prove that Jesus was raised from the dead and that there's no explanation for the evidence other than an actual resurrection, which means that God must have raised Jesus and that proved the historical reliability of the Christian claims. And what would you have said? The evidence was given that there's no doubt that most historians would balk at any challenge to prove the resurrection. So how would a historian go about doing that? Again, so this is back in my very conservative day, Christian days. I would have said that there are two basic historical facts that virtually everybody agrees on and people need to explain these two facts. The two facts are that three days after Jesus was put in a tomb, the tomb was empty and that some of his followers said they saw him alive again afterward, and that any explanation for those two facts has to explain both of them satisfactorily. And then what I would do is I would go by go through various explanations for why there would be an empty tomb and why people would say they saw him alive afterward, including groups of people. And I would say that none of the naturalist explanations simply work for those phenomena. Well, so as a skeptic here, some explanations just come rushing in for me, as you might imagine. I'm just wondering why. And I guess I'm not speaking about you personally here, but just as a matter of culture. The the culture of people like you who are very well versed in the Bible, who believe the central doctrines of Christianity and anchor their belief to this claim here's. The first thing that as an atheist debater on this topic would come to mind to say. I mean, there's there's obviously this Hume's famous line that about there being no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it's, I think his word is endeavors to establish. So again, translating that into modern English, the testimony about the miracle, it would have to be an even greater miracle for that testimony to be false. And that bar is almost never cleared. You can think of uncountable number of modern situations where you have Western devotees of Indian gurus who believe that their teacher has performed a miracle and the culture of confirmation bias and self deception is just palpable. When you talk to these people, I mean, you're surrounded by people who, even in a modern context where they have all of the resources of scientific skepticism at their disposal. And when they haven't been indoctrinated into these beliefs since birth, you can still find Ivy League educated people who are convinced of the veracity of various miracles really on the basis of hearsay. I mean, they're not disposed to put these claims to any kind of empirical or logical test. And certainly they're not meeting Hume's criterion here that the testimony of these people, the people who are delivering the hearsay is somehow so rock solid that it would be an even greater miracle that you'd have to admit if you were to suspect that it's false. How is it that you account for what seems, at least from the outside, to be such a disinclination to put these claims to some obvious skeptical tests? Right. I completely agree with your view on this now. And I have debates with people today, public debates with people who want to argue that resurrection really happened. And it's incredible to me that they continue to think that you can prove this. But as you know from your debates, people who are inside a particular tradition evaluate probability differently from people who are outside that tradition. And so the Christians, people who like me, were fundamentalists. What we would argue at the time was a couple of things. One is that the disciples absolutely thought they saw Jesus raised from the dead. They talked with Him, they ate with Him, they spent time with Him after his crucifixion. And the reason we know that they really did is because they all were willing to be martyred for this belief that he'd been raised for us was evidence that it happened. But not only that, but we're not just talking about individual things where you could say that somebody had a dream or a hallucination. We have authors claiming that 500 people saw him at the same time. So it couldn't be a hallucination because there I mean, you can't have a group of hallucination of 500 people. So this was these these are the kind of arguments we have. And these arguments made real sense to people who already believed in the resurrection because it just seemed plausible. And to outsiders, of course, it just seems kind of crazy. But to insiders for everything with the past, you're trying to evaluate what probably happened, and there's no reason it probably didn't happen. And so well, okay, it seems like it probably did happen. Yeah. So the other issue here which comes ready to hand is the time at which these various Gospels were composed. Perhaps you can remind me of the history here. None of these documents that are ostensibly reporting these eyewitness accounts of miracles were actually contemporaneous with the miracles or with the ministry of Jesus. What is the earliest account we have of anything that Jesus is reported to have said or done? Right, yeah. So the basic dating is that Jesus died around the year 30 of the Common Era. Our earliest Gospel is probably the Gospel of Mark, which is written around the year 70 of the Common Era. So it's 40 years later. This is the kind of contemporary view of critical scholars. Matthew and Luke would have been later than that, maybe 80 to 85 of the Common Era. John maybe 90 or 95. So we're talking 65 years later for the Gospel of John. And so when I was a when I was a fundamentalist Christian, though I didn't accept those dates, I thought that Matthew and John were written by people who were actually disciples of Jesus, and Mark and Luke were written by people who knew eyewitnesses. And moreover, I would point out at the time that even prior to the Gospels, the Apostle Paul was writing and Paul wasn't one of Jesus'disciples. But Paul claims that he himself saw Jesus alive soon after his death, within a couple of years of his death. And Paul tells us that he knew 500 people who had seen Jesus at one time. And so today, critical scholars would say, look, we don't have these accounts until decades later, which I think is right. But when I was a fundamentalist, I would try to kind of argue back closer to the time of Jesus, that we actually have people who said they knew eyewitnesses. And is that standard among fundamentalists, however well educated in the text, that they would not agree with the modern academic? That's right. So the deal with the modern academic dating is the Gospel of Mark seems to know that the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans. That happened in the year 70. And so probably it's written sometime after the fact, but fundamentalist Christians would say, no, it's predicting it's going to happen. And so it could have happened well before this gospel is well before that. And if you don't agree with that, it's because you have an anti supernaturalist bias. Interesting. So they get kind of an added benefit there. They not only get the contemporaneous record, they get the truth of prophecy. That's right. Interesting. It's good to focus on why all of this is important. There's a lot riding on this because the resurrection of Jesus is really the core miracle that I guess I should just ask you, what do you think? Or is there a standard conception of the minimal set of beliefs that makes a person a Christian? I understand that the fundamentalist would draw the line differently than others, but I'm just reminded of the line from I think it's first Corinthians from Paul, where he says, if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, which is to say, completely ineffectual in error. So there is no Christianity on Paul's account. There is no Christianity unless the miracle of the resurrection is true. At least that's how I read that line. Is that the center of the center of the doctrine for most Christians, or certainly anyone whose Christianity wouldn't have evaporated to a point where it really has no supernatural characteristic. Yeah. So the reality on the ground is that there is a bottom line for what one has to believe in order to be a Christian. And every Christian draws that bottom line in different places, and every Christian thinks that they're the only ones who have the right line. So, yes, there are lots of Christians who would say, if you don't believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus, then you really aren't a Christian, whatever else you might say. And they would quote that line from Paul, from one Corinthians 15 that you are quoting just now. I know lots and lots of Christians who don't believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus. They think that his body stayed in the grave, rotted in the grave, and that the resurrection is more of a spiritual event or it's a metaphorical event, but they still consider themselves Christian. There are lots of very highly educated Christians who are sophisticated. The more evangelical Christians would say, well, you're not really a Christian. And the other Christians would say, well, actually, you're not the one who's been given the right to define what a Christian is. And so there are these very large debates within Christianity itself about where the bottom line is. Yeah. And I must say, I have met very sophisticated people, very well educated people, very successful people, who are believing Christians. And when pressed on this point, I have been astonished to discover that they actually believe the literal story of resurrection. And these are not people who I would have thought were Bible thumpers or fundamentalists of any sort. This is like the last trench that has to be defended in the war against doubt. No, there certainly are a lot of people like that who are otherwise, who believe in evolution, they believe in science, they think the universe is 13.8 billion years old and whatever, but they would draw the line at a literal resurrection. And there are a lot of other people, not as many, but there are sophisticated Christian thinkers who say, no, that it's not a literal resurrection and that in fact, the earliest christians didn't believe in a literal resurrection, that that was a later imposition on the faith. Let's talk about a few other doctrinal claims that may or may not be central. So what is the place of heaven and Hell, would you say, in Christianity generally, and your version when you were a believer in particular? Yeah, so this is something I'm very interested in because it's what my next book is on. It's where the question of heaven and where the issue heaven and hell came from, because the standard Christian belief is that when a person dies, their soul goes to heaven or hell goes for eternal reward or eternal punishment. And that teaching is not in the Old Testament and it's not what the historical Jesus thought. And so where did it come from? And so that's what my next book is. When I was a fundamentalist Christian, I was a fervent believer in a literal heaven and a literal hell. And I believed that hell was a place of eternal torment, that it would never end, with no possibility of escape, and it was the destination of the vast majority of the human race. I can't say that the kind of arrogance involved with that kind of claim that I'm going to be rewarded forever, but my next door neighbor, poor SAP, he's going to help forever. That's the arrogance of it, I don't think, actually struck me at the time. And were you actually psychologically affected by it? I mean, presumably you knew people who you recognized to be good people, who you had nice connections with, but who you were sure were going to spend eternity and fire. Was that belief deep enough so as to cause you any feeling of psychological pain or compassion or how did you feel interacting with people who you knew were destined to be tortured for eternity? Yeah, no, it absolutely did have an effect. And where it was practically manifest was in my desire to convert people, because I believed that goodness had nothing to do with it. It didn't matter whether you were a good person or a rotten person. If you didn't believe in Christ for your salvation, you are destined for hell. And so this is what drove my attempt to try and convert people. Just as in early Christianity, it was this belief that drove the evangelism of the early Church. So it's always been this kind of motivation for Christians that if you really love somebody and you know they're going to hell, you need to sort of crack the whip and make them convert. There certainly are scriptural justifications for that belief. Now, we're up against the limits of my Bible scholarship, but I seem to remember many passages where it suggested either directly in the words of Jesus himself, or at least by one of the gospel writers, that there is no path to the Father but through the Son. Right? That's right. That's the emphatic teaching of the Gospel of John and that everybody who doesn't believe in Christ is going to be condemned. But in the Gospels, it's not clear that this is eternal torment in a particular place. The idea of eternal torment comes more clearly in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament, where those who are opposed to God are thrown into a lake of fire and they burn in this lake of fire forever. I seem to remember that Jesus is presiding over that lake of fire. Well, yeah. Part of the intrigue of the Book of Revelation is how intricate the scenario is, which is, I think, one of the reasons people have been so drawn to it over the years, because it isn't just kind of a straightforward statement. It's actually this graphic narrative portrayal and trying to piece it all together because you've got Christ and you've got God and you've got the angels and you've got the Antichrist and the prophet of the Antichrist, and so you have this entire scenario going on. But, yeah, Christ and his followers are given an eternal reward in the New Jerusalem, and all those opposed to Christ are sent to the lake of fire. So if one were going to read the Bible, both Old and New Testament straight through and form on the assumption that everything there is true and inerrant and that it's sort of on the reader to resolve any apparent contradictions, what rational understanding and expectation of the afterlife would one form? This is now a picture of the end times and one's personal end, you know, after death and I guess after the Resurrection. And this is now sort of uncontaminated by the rest of the literature that has grown up on this. So let's let's leave Dante and Milton and everything else that has come since aside. What does Heaven and Hell look like and what does the end of the world look like? Yeah. So it really depends on what the assumptions of the reader are. If you're a reader who knows nothing about Milton or Dante or anyone is just coming to it but is intelligent, but tries to reconcile everything, what that person would argue probably is in a view of progressive revelation, where the ideas that are most true develop over time. And some of the earlier authors don't recognize the truth, the full truth, they only have partial revelation. And in that understanding of things. The idea in the shield of the Old Testament where everybody goes to this kind of nether world and they stay in this netherworld forever. That gets modified over time until you get into the gospels where the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished. But it looks like they're punished by annihilation. That develops yet further when you get to the Book of Revelation, when you find out that, in fact, people are not annihilated, they're tortured forever. And so the idea then would be that it's all consistent, but only. In the sense that there was a progressive revelation. And this reader of the Bible, this hypothetical read of the Bible then basically agrees with the final book that there's eternal torment or eternal reward. Islam has a similar concept of abrogation where later verses abrogate earlier verses. And as luck would have it, the more violent verses tend to abrogate the more peaceful ones to the benefit of all humanity. So that is viewed in the Christian tradition that progressive revelation, not as any sort of data point against this notion of inerrancy. You can still be inerrant even while various Gospel writers or their predecessors are laboring under incomplete knowledge of God's plan. Yeah, it's because of the view of inerrancy that this view developed because you have to reconcile these things. And so what a critical scholar would look at and say, well, this is just inconsistent. One author has one view and another has another view and they can't be lined up to you. Then the way to get around that is by saying, yeah, it's progressive revelation. So then what would heaven look like to someone who has gone through this whole progression and come out with some kind of final expectation? What is the picture of the afterlife if you go to the Good Place, this is the interesting point is that if you're just sticking with the Bible, you don't have the idea that you die and your soul goes to heaven forever. It's that at the end of time bodies are going to be raised from the dead and that there will be a final judgment on the earth and God will destroy the forces of evil and he will send everybody who is opposed to Him into eternal punishment. But he will raise from the dead all of his righteous and they'll live here on Earth forever in a utopian kingdom. And so the earth will be returned to its state, the state that it was in during the days of Adam and Eve, and it'll be a perfect paradise forever. So it is a terrestrial paradise that presumably now functions by a slightly tweaked laws of physics so that it can last forever here, but it's not somewhere else and it's not in some ethereal condition. That's right. In this view, the tweaking actually happened with Adam and Eve that originally this world was created as a paradise and the because of their sin, it got corrupted. And so God is going to reverse the sin that was brought into the world by Adam and Eve and bring it back to its original state, which is supposed to be a place of eternal bliss. I must say I'm rarely in conversations with Christians about these sorts of things, but this is certainly not a scientific poll. But I am certainly walking around with the feeling that most Christians are believing in a very different heaven. I think when someone dies close to them who they think is still in the faith and destined for heaven. They're not picturing that person moldering in the ground for thousands of years or however long it takes for Jesus to come back and usher in the end of the world. They're picturing that person, that person's soul more or less moving directly from the hospital bed or wherever they were when they died into some ethereal condition, which is the afterlife. And it is eternal, and it's in the company of God or Jesus or some circumstance that's just a matter of pure satisfaction and well being. Two questions. Am I wrong about that? Is, isn't that what many, if not most Christians believe? And and if so, what are the the scriptural antecedents for that belief? That you're right, that that is the belief. And that's one of the reasons I'm writing this next book about where these Christian ideas of the afterlife came from, because most of the Bible doesn't teach them. You can get to that view from a few passages, sort of random and isolated passages which don't actually say quite that about this ethereal afterlife for the souls. But you do get a couple of passages in the writings of Paul where he seems to think that, yes, there is going to be this resurrection of bodies at the end of time, but in the meantime, when people die, they've got this immediate presence with Christ in heaven. And I think that that idea that you have this immediate presence with Christ at your death gets transformed into this idea of an ethereal existence. The thing is that most Christians who have this idea of this kind of existence of your soul, but not your body, have conflicted views because they also think that when they get to heaven, they'll be able to see their grandmother and talk with her. Well, I mean, if she doesn't have a body, what are you going to see exactly? And how are you going to recognize her? And, you know, so they have to come up with kind of weird explanations for how, in fact, it's your soul, but the soul has the physical appearance of your body, even though you don't actually have eyes anymore, you can still see and you can still hear and so forth. And how old is your grandmother? Is she restored to her the prime age of 30, or is she still granny in that condition? Well, that's right. And if you've had an infant child who's died, is the child still an infant? Or what are they in heaven? And so you have Christians who seriously debate these issues and actually write books trying to explain what it's really going to be like. I recall St. Thomas Aquinas dealing with some of this stuff. You have Christians debating all sorts of issues relating this all the way back into the second Christian century. I mean, you have Christians asking if the body is raised from the dead at the end of time. And so all of the parts of your body are brought together. What happens if you were eaten by a cannibal so that part of your body became part of the cannibal's body. So when the parts are raised from the dead, who gets the parts, you or the cannibal? And so you have people debating this kind of thing all the way back. It's tempting to picture the very different history where the doctrine of Christianity was fatally confounded by one cannibal. Yes. Right. So then what is the picture of hell that one can rationally form on the basis of Scripture? So most of the Bible, of course, is the Old Testament. And in the Old Testament, there isn't a Hell, a place of torment. There's this place called Shiel, which is a shadowy existence where everybody goes good or or wicked believers or non believers, and it's just you kind of you exist there and not much happens forever when you get to the teachings of Jesus. Jesus thought that there'd be a resurrection of the dead at the end of the end of time, and he appears to have thought that those who were opposed to God were not going to be tormented forever, they were going to be annihilated. Unlike the righteous, the righteous will be given an eternal reward, but God will punish the wicked by destroying them. And the Apostle Paul never says anything about Hell as a place of eternal torment. It's not really until you get to the Book of Revelation that you start getting this eternal torment idea of having this lake of fire. Is it Revelation that also gives us the notion of the Rapture, or is that prefigured somewhere else? Is that an Old Testament prophecy that then Revelation connects the dots on? Well, this is an interesting point that even most Christians don't know. The Book of Revelation does describe what's going to happen at the end of time, but it does not have a doctrine of the rapture. There's no rapture in the Book of Revelation. The idea of a rapture actually comes from the Apostle Paul. In the book of one, thessalonians Paul, it's talking about what's going to happen at the end when there will be a resurrection of the dead. And he says that Jesus is coming back from heaven and those who have died in Christ are raised from the dead, and those who are living at the time will be taken up with them into the sky and they'll meet Jesus there up in the air. So it actually comes from Paul's letters rather than from the Book of Revelation. Right. So now, did you believe in the Rapture when you were at this point, at the peak of your faith? I not only believed in it, I knew it was going to happen before the late 1980s, literally. Wow. So then had you lost your faith by the time the late 80s came around? Or was that one of the reasons why you lost it? Well, I'd certainly lost my faith in the Rapture by that time. My loss of faith was kind of a long term process, and the Raptor was one of the first things to go. So what was the first doubt that was truly insuperable? Did it move in discernible increments where you crossed some kind of bright line and couldn't get yourself back to feeling the faith you had felt the day before? Yeah, there were a number of lines, but the sort of first moment was when I realized that the Bible was not. Inerrant my first year at Princeton Theological Seminary, I was taking a course on the Gospel of Mark, which was based on an interpretation of the Greek text. And so I knew Greek by this time, and we had to translate the entire Gospel of Mark, and we did an interpretation of every every verse. You know, it's very deep and detailed. And I had to write a term paper, and I wrote a paper on a passage in Mark where Jesus is talking about a story in the Old Testament that happens. And he says that this account happened when Abiathar was the high priest. This is in Mark, chapter two. When you read the Old Testament account, actually, the account that he's summarizing didn't take place when Abiathar was the high priest. It happened when his father a Himalaych, was the high priest. So I write this 30 page paper arguing that even though Jesus said that Abiathar was the high priest, it didn't really mean that Abiathar was the high priest. He knew that Himalay was the high priest. I write this long paper and the professor reads the paper he likes the paper gives me an A because I had the this complicated grammatical argument. But at the end of it, he said, maybe Mark just made a mistake. I thought that'd be easier than 30 pages of dancing around the problem and coming up with this fancy grammatical thing. Yeah, maybe Mark just made a mistake. And once I recognized that there could be a mistake, it opened up the floodgates. And I started finding mistakes without wanting to. And then I started wanting to, and then I started finding them all over the place. There are mistakes with respect to facts we know outside the text of the Bible, but there are contradictions within the Bible that are any way you squint your eyes. They are contradictions. I remember there was an old book, I think it's probably 150 years old. I remember I have somewhere in the house which I I referenced in my first book, The End of Faith. I think the title is Self Contradictions in the Bible. And some of these are just, you know, it's just that the coin came up heads or the coin came up tails. You can't believe both. I think one was, you know, John the Baptist was in prison at the time of the crucifixion, or John the Baptist was somewhere else at the time of the crucifixion. How did you deal with those? Well, the intellectual task of fundamentalists involves reconciling differences. And if you work hard enough at it, you can reconcile just about anything. And so it was like solving a puzzle. You assume that there are no errors, and if that's your assumption, well, then there are no errors. And the task is to find out why this is not a contradiction. And so today when I talk with fundamentalist Christians and try and point out the Gospel of John says Jesus died the day before the Passover and the Gospel of Mark says he died the day after the Passover and they both can't be right, well, they have a way of reconciling it. So that's what you do. So what is the hardest thing to reconcile? If you are going to point out one thing that you think stood the best chance of toppling the whole house of cards, what is that thing? Well, the example I just gave is the one that I use if I want to convince if I've got one example, I walk them through what happens in John's gospel because John explicitly dates the day of Jesus death as the day before that. He explicitly says what time of day and which day it was on. And the Gospel of Mark also explicitly says what time of day and which day it was on. And they just flat out contradict each other. And so when you take somebody actually through the text and show this to them, then that does it. What I do with my students is I do a number of things with them to get them to see how there are different views in the Bible. But one thing I do is I have them compare either the accounts of Jesus birth in Matthew and Luke, or the accounts of his resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And I simply say, look, list everything that happens in this gospel, then list everything that happens in that gospel and compare your two lists and see if there's anything that is impossible to reconcile. And in both cases, there are things you simply cannot reconcile because they just contradict each other. Actually, I think we should go back to the time at which these texts were written based on modern scholarship for a moment, because if you accept that there was a significant delay in the composition of of even the earliest gospels. So if if Mark was 40 years after the the death of Jesus and that's the earliest text, just map that on to our present conversation. It's as though you and I were now talking about without the aid of any media, without the aid of any real written materials or anything. It's as though you and I are in a world now where we could talk about some historical figure who had a great influence a generation and a half ago. We're talking about JFK or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or somebody who we never met. We may not have met anyone who met that person. This person has. There's a kind of a residue of their life's work in the world based on almost entirely verbal accounts. Because, again, we don't have the Internet. We don't have widespread literacy and contemporaneous records. We just have rumors of rumors. And now you and I are going to put pen to paper or papyrus and write an account of exactly what happened in the last years and weeks and days of this person's life. That's the picture, at least I form of what this would look like. And the idea that that kind of effort, absent some direct line to an omniscient being who's just simply telling you what happened, that seems like an all too human enterprise that, if nothing else, will introduce a fair amount of error and creative license and whimsy into the process. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. Consent's podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. No housekeeping today. Going to jump right into it. Today I'm speaking with Matt McCarthy. Matt is an infectious disease doctor and a professor of medicine at Cornell, where he also serves on the ethics committee. His writing has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Sports Illustrated, Slate, and other journals. He's the author of several books and his latest is Superbugs The Race to Stop an Epidemic. And that's what we talk about today. The problem that many of the drugs we use to treat infectious disease are now failing and will always be failing. We're in a perpetual arms race against evolution and the emergence of new bugs that our immune systems have never seen. And this, quite amazingly, is a problem that is receiving very little attention. And yet it's on the short list of things that could utterly transform the character of human life, very much for the worse. It's also on the short list of problems for which the market appears to offer no solution, as we will discuss. So now, without further delay, I bring you Matt McCarthy. I am here with Matt McCarthy. Matt, thanks for coming on the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. So you have written a book that could be terrifying. You try to be as hopeful as you can be throughout, but God, this topic is just brutal. I mean, this could be my own germ phobia creeping in here. But you have written a book superbugs. The Race to Stop an Epidemic. And this is a topic I've been worrying about for a long time, and I think ever since that the first ebola scare and some of the books that followed. Now we're talking. That must have been 1999 or thereabouts maybe earlier when I remember Laurie Garrett wrote a big book about the prospect of emerging pandemics. Before we jump into the topic, tell us how you got into infectious disease and just what your focus has been. Yeah, well, I'm glad that you've been worrying about this for a while because not enough people have been thinking about superbugs, and I think the first thing is useful to define the term. Some people say that drug resistant bacteria are superbugs, but I take a much broader look at it and say that what we're really talking about are drug resistant fungi and parasites and viruses and all kinds of living things that can come and attack us. And writing this book, I wasn't trying to freak people out, but I think that has been sort of the fallout, is that people read this and go, oh, man, this is a big deal. And those of us in infectious diseases have been trying to sound the alarm about this for a while. The World Health Organization just came out and said that superbugs are going to be a bigger killer than heart disease and cancer by 2050. And so how I got into this, it wasn't something that I had always dreamed of being an infectious disease specialist. I was a first year medical student at Harvard in 2003 and I heard a lecture by a young and charismatic infectious disease doctor named Paul Farmer, right? He traveled to Haiti and all over the world bringing drugs to people who couldn't afford them, bringing antibiotics and HIV medicines and tuberculosis medicines to people. And I just fell under his sway and I said, this is the guy. I want to do what he does. And six months later, I found myself in Western Africa hunting for the Ebola virus and trying to become an infectious disease doctor. And so that was 15 years ago. And so that sort of launched me in this career of trying to find what's going to be the next big pandemic, what's going to be the thing that gets to us and how do we attack that and how do we come up with treatments to stave off the next big thing? Yeah, I mean, one problem is that many of us have forgotten, or we never knew, in fact, how scary it was to live in a world where infectious diseases were ascendant. We have forgotten what it's like for people to routinely die from tetanus and other wound infections or the whole generations of people were moving to warmer climates, however ineffectually, to try to mitigate their tuberculosis, which would kill them anyway. And we lived in a world for the longest time, forever, where there was just simply no guarantee or even promise that infections could be reliably treated. And then we had this fundamental breakthrough, which you detail in your book. Penicillin was the first widely available antibiotic and it really ushered in a golden age when you could cure, you could expect to cure all of these invisible agents of death. And we seem to have taken it for granted up to the point where now we have fallen out of that happy condition. Well, you nailed it. This is the thing that most people don't realize is the luxury we have of antibiotics. As you said, penicillin ushered in the golden era of the 1950s where every month or two we were pumping out a new life saving drug and the life expectancy ballooned because of all of these new drugs. And then what happened was a number of prominent scientists, nobel laureates came out and said, we got this infectious disease thing kicked. It's time to move on to more pressing matters like heart disease and cancer. And the pharmaceutical industry responded and started making chemotherapy drugs and blood thinners and all of these lucrative things just as the superbugs were starting to mutate and to evolve and to become resistant to our treatments. And so now we're finding that as we're finally paying attention to this issue, we're behind the eight ball in a sense, because we're playing catch up. The drugs aren't working as well as they used to and we're scrambling to find the next generation of life saving drugs. I'm reminded of this every single day when I walk into the hospital. The first place I go is the emergency room and I meet the patients who have these drug resistant infections. And that's actually what led me to write this book, is that people have talked about superbugs before. They've talked about the policy, about the science behind it, all of the stuff sort of at a 30,000 foot view. But what I was interested in were the patients stories and the lives that are completely derailed by these things. And the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is losing interest in making new antibiotics is devastating for tens of thousands of people. And so I'm trying to raise awareness, but also say, here's how we got in this mess and here's how we get out of it. So let's talk about the ways in which the business model of the pharmaceutical industry is not helping us here and the market is not helping us here. But before we get there, let's just talk about the kind of the basic science. What we have is it really could have been foreseen based on evolutionary principles. I mean, we this isn't surprising that we have bugs that can mutate and become resistant to the treatments we devise for them. And again, the reminders of this happening are everywhere. We're recording this on a Monday. Yesterday, the front page of the Sunday New York Times had a story on urinary tract infections showing antibiotic resistance. To a surprising degree, something like 30% are resistant to most antibiotics. At this point, it really is a pressing concern. But it's not just a matter of bugs evolving and getting around our antibiotics. It's also just the fact that there are so called superbugs everywhere, as yet unencumbered by us because there are bacteria in the soil and elsewhere which our immune system hasn't devised any response to, and our drugs can't anticipate. And so, whether they mutate or not, we are very likely to encounter so called superbugs in the future. You're absolutely right. And one of the big problems we have is how doctors and scientists talk about these superbugs. You mentioned that front page Science Times article. I know the guy who wrote that piece because he's interviewed me before. And one of the quotes from that article is that this level of antibiotic resistance is shocking. And I read that and I thought shocking to who? Because doctors know this and scientists know this, but if this is shocking to delay public that's because we haven't done a good enough job of explaining exactly how this is happening. But we just had a new rollover with first year doctors who start in July, and every one of them knows by the third day of work that the antibiotics that they used in medical school are no longer working and they got to use a new crop of drugs just to treat people. And that's because the bacteria are evolving, as you mentioned, and they're coming up with these ingenious ways to destroy the antibiotics that we've relied upon for a generation. One of the things they do is they make these things called eFlux pumps, which are like microscopic vacuum cleaners, and they suck up antibiotics and they spit them out, and then they use these enzymes that can chop up antibiotics. And so what we do, and what my research is, is we look for new ways to fool the bacteria. And so one thing we found, for example, is that bacteria love iron. So we'll use a Trojan horse approach where we will attach an antibiotic to iron with the hope that the bacteria will see that iron and eat it and suck it up. And along with it, the antibiotic will go inside the cell and kill it. And we found that to be a pretty successful method so far for killing certain types of superbugs. And so the stuff that I do is, as I mentioned before, kind of scary stuff. But I'm also really excited and optimistic about all of the amazing science that's going on where we're constantly trying to to fool the bacteria and come up with the, the way to save, you know, millions of lives. It's, it's extraordinary the kind of science that's being done. And I don't think we're talking about it enough. Much of the work that you see in the newspapers has to do with the outbreaks or with the evolution of these drug resistant bacteria. But I'd like to see a bit more about the profiles of the scientists who are coming up with new cures. Yeah, I can see the basis for hope, although we might be a little slow in getting there. But the difference between not having a remedy and having one that actually works and works as emphatically, as an antibiotic that works does in fact, work. It's just amazing. The 1950s must have been a mind blowing decade to live through, to suddenly see these appalling diseases cured. Now we're talking about not just antibiotics, but let's add vaccines to that picture. And then it just begins to look like every previous generation of humanity begins to look just unfortunate for having been born at the wrong time. Because now we have these cures for diseases that people can just forget about for the rest of their lives. And yet the problem, as you point out in your book, is that we should have always known that the arms race would never stop. These microorganisms are evolving quickly and of course, our treatment, and in the worst case, our misuse of antibiotics is creating a selection pressure which will select for resistance. Absolutely. Yeah. And I open my book with a scene from the pre antibiotic era, which is that we're on a battlefield in France and there are these soldiers who are getting hit with shrapnel and they're getting infections. And what do you do before there are antibiotics? Well, you can try antiseptic fluid. It didn't work all that well. Or you can try a hacksaw. And that increasingly, is what people have to do, is just go to the hacksaw and cut somebody's leg off to prevent them from getting an infection. And the reason for that is that if the infection that's on the skin or on the leg gets into the blood, that's called sepsis. And if you have sepsis, you're going to die without antibiotics. And so I wanted to paint that picture for people to recognize that we're heading to a pre antibiotic era where the drugs we've relied upon for 75 years don't work anymore. And it's not a period to say it's not a doomsday scenario. We have a chance to invest in new treatments, but we have to do so selectively and carefully. And this is really an inflection point for humanity where we can say this is an important issue. It's like global warming. It's like whatever else you hear about every day, this needs to be talked about in the same breath as a danger that we can invest in and come up with cures for. Let's talk about the problem of overuse, which is part of what got us here. I guess we would have gotten here even if we'd use these drugs as circumspectly as possible. But there is this pervasive problem of overuse. And I'm wondering if the incentives are misaligned here between the individual and society, or if there's just a new way of understanding this. Because when I think about what most people's experience is in getting sick or watching their kid get sick and then facing the question of whether to treat with an antibiotic, it has been a very frequent experience for many of us to be prescribed an antibiotic, essentially to be on the safe side, just prescribed empirically. You haven't even gotten to the point where an infection has been cultured and you know precisely what is responsive to you're given a broad spectrum antibiotic and this is just a prudent thing to do. And now we're stepping back and saying, well, this is not great for society because, again, we're part of the arms race that is creating a selection environment for superbugs. But it's part of the problem here that what is in fact prudent for an individual is raising the risk for society, or are the risks actually the same? That is when you're taking an antibiotic, as it said. Just to be on the safe side. Are you actually running the risk of breeding a superbug? That is likely to be a problem for you first. Or is it conceivable that you're actually being prudent for yourself, but conceivably becoming a problem for society and how you're using these drugs? Well, I'm a medical school professor at Cornell, and that question that you just asked is what comes up on rounds almost every single day in various iterations, which is we've got a patient in front of us who may have an infection and we're not sure. Do we give them an antibiotic just to be on the safe side? And generations of young doctors and old doctors have been dealing with that question. I'll tell you, I was given a talk about superbugs a couple of weeks ago, and there was a guy who raised his hand and said, you know how locusts were cast upon the Earth as a judgment for human behavior? Do you think superbugs have been cast upon the Earth as a similar judgment for human behavior? And the question caught me off guard at first, but there's an argument to be made that in the same way that we brought this on ourselves. And and the issue really is on the small scale and the large scale, on the small scale, we've got doctors who are prescribing antibiotics, as you mentioned, just to be on the safe side. And that's no longer good enough as an excuse to prescribe something. And we've created a mechanism to check that. We have these people in the hospital who are called antibiotic stewards. And if you want to prescribe an antibiotic and one of our powerful drugs, the steward has to approve it. And that's a job that I've had before. And I'll tell you, it's a thankless job, because what happens is a surgeon orders an expensive antibiotic and then I have to call them and say, I'm sorry, that's the wrong drug. And they say, oh, come on, please. I've been doing this 20 years. This is the drug I use. And I have to say, well, not anymore. There's a better option for you. And so we're trying to check that the doctor's mis prescribing things. But also this is about patients can do a better job as well. If your doctor prescribes five days of an antibiotic and you stop taking it after day two because you're feeling better, that gives the bugs a chance to mutate and to evolve, because you're not killing all of them. And so it selects out the ones that can survive. So that's sort of on the small scale, how we can be doing a better job. Let me just ask you about the logic of that. Stewart is saying, no, don't use that drug. Use this one is that a case where he or she is trying to preserve the efficacy of the last line defenses we have? Absolutely. And so what happens is I'll give you an example. There's an antibiotic called Mirropenum that we love using because it is so strong and it wipes out just about everything. And so if you're a doctor who just performed a complicated abdominal surgery, you want things to go well for that patient. You're going to ask for mere penum and I'm going to say, well, based on everything we know about the patient and the environment and the type of surgery you did, you could use cephriaxone, which is not nearly as strong. And then we have to have an argument about how to go forward. And I was listening to your podcast with Ricky Gervais and he started out by telling you that there's no place for nuanced arguments anymore. And I felt so bad for him because all I do is have nuanced arguments with people all day long and I have many nuanced arguments about antibiotics with very sharp surgeons and clinicians who really are advocating for their patient. And we have to be the ones as stewards to say that's not the right drug and face the fallout if the antibiotic doesn't work. This is what I was worried about. So there really is a misalignment between the interests of the patient narrowly construed and the interests of society with respect to a choice about which drug to use? Absolutely. And I'm on the ethics committee, and my research interests sort of are the intersection of infectious diseases and medical ethics and what we talk about a lot. And what I study is, what do you do if you're a doctor and you have a patient who's got, let's say, two weeks to live, they've got terminal cancer and they get a superbug infection? Do you treat them with one of the powerful antibiotics that we have, one of our precious drugs in the arsenal and potentially breed resistance and potentially breed superbugs, but to save that patient who's only got a few weeks to live? As I've found, doctors approach that question very differently and there's no uniform answer for them. And so sort of the next generation of clinicians are sort of winging it and figuring it out on the fly, which is how do you make life and death decisions when there is no formal training in how to do that? And so that's sort of on the small scale question of antibiotics. And then there's the larger scale issue, which is that we are using syphilis drugs and tuberculosis drugs in our orange groves. We're using our powerful fungal drugs in tulip gardens. We're pumping meat, producing animals full of antibiotics. And whenever people hear this, they say, well, that's terrible, that should stop. But the reason that it doesn't stop is that there are powerful lobbies behind big orange, the meat industry big tulip is something that you have to contend with. And these are things that allow these groups, allow the antibiotics to go in places they shouldn't. And then when we search the soil around those tulips, it's full of superbugs. And if you're somebody with a weakened immune system, you breathe in the wrong thing, you could end up in the intensive care unit. And we're trying to become much more judicious about how we use those drugs. So how are our oranges and our tulips getting syphilis? Are they going to brothels? They're very promiscuous, oranges and tulips. And we're trying to get starts with education, get them early. But what we recognize that there have been just sort of this freewheeling approach to prescribing practices all over the world. And that brings up another issue, which is the more we look for superbugs, the more we find them. And people try to categorize what's the burden of disease or what's the burden of these things around the world. We don't even know what's going on in Africa or in many places in sub Saharan Africa, in Bangladesh, in India. Every time we start looking for superbugs, we end up finding much more than we expected. And I think that that's only going to continue to grow in the years ahead. And so part of it is getting better diagnostics so that we can know what we're dealing with, so that we can come up with treatment plans. As far as the source of each new antibiotic, what percentage of them come from nature? Penicillin was a compound produced by a fungus, right? So how much of our drug development is a matter of finding happy accidents in nature? And how much is us synthesizing new drugs based on a first principal understanding of the target microbe? Yeah, you hit on the two major approaches, which is do we just get lucky and, and hope for the best, or do we build a new antibiotic? And both approaches have worked. What we're finding is that it's getting to be prohibitively expensive to build new antibiotics atom by atom or molecule by molecule. So what people are doing now is they're searching in the soil. And the reason for that is that beneath our feet there is this subterranean warfare where survival of the fittest, bacteria and fungi are pumping out chemicals to kill each other. And if we can pull one of those out, you've got yourself an antibiotic. The problem is that it typically costs about a billion dollars and ten years of testing to show that that chemical is safe and effective as an antibiotic. And fewer and fewer companies want to take that financial risk because if they get that drug approved, compare it to a blood pressure medicine or a lipid lowering agent, these drugs antibiotics are prescribed. The doctors are very stingy about prescribing them. They're only prescribed in short courses. And then even that great new antibiotic is going to wear out its welcome. So these companies are saying, no, thank you. We don't even want to go on the fishing expedition anymore. And so that has kind of led us to what I consider the most important medical issue that no one is talking about, which is that the antibiotic market is broken and we should be asking every politician, every political candidate, what are you going to do to fix it? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Hey. Hi. How's it going? Yeah, good. Bit sweating. I just had a hot bath. I was already in. It was too late. I couldn't back out. But yeah, good. From judging from Twitter, you're a bathman more than a shower, man. I love it. I have I have two either two baths a day in the winter or a bath in the shower, or two showers in the summer. Sometimes I do it because I'm bored. There's something I think it's from my upbringing where, you know, we could only have one bath a week when I was little. Wow. Sometimes secondhand water. Oh, I've had it hard. It was like it's like a Bickens novel. That is that is hard. You joke, but that is yeah. Deprivation. One bath a week. I mean, that's that's 17th century stuff. Well, I remember in the winter in our house, we had this is absolutely true. This sounds like a joke. This sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but we had ice on the inside of the windows when I woke up. Yeah. I used to dream I'd got up and got dressed, and then I'd wake up and go, oh, fuck, I haven't got dressed. I know. Anyway, have you got a minute? I've got a question for you. Another question? Yeah. I'm just not in the bath. I've been thinking a lot about the brain, or rather my brain has that's sort of a point. Now, this is quite a long question. Stop me at any point if I've made some sort of fallacious leap. Okay. The brain I totally understand evolution by natural selection. It's a no brainer, and the brain is just an organ like anything else, okay? It came from 3 billion years, from a blob of reproductive protein to this most complex computer, right? But it is just physical. It's it, you know, it goes by all the laws, the contingent laws of the universe chemistry, physics, energy, electricity, all that, right? But obviously, we're talking about this. It has the epic phenomenon of consciousness. We feel like we've got a self. We feel like we've got free will, even though that's an illusion. And this leads to imagination, invention of philosophy, art, gods. So two part questionnaire. One, a chimps going through that. Do you think they've got all the rudimentary tools to invent their gods or have spirituality or he need his imagination and a decent brain, or even a sense of self? And two, if that is true, if the brain is purely physical, it can be reproduced. So in the future, will a computer will we have paranoid computers? Will we have computers that are nice and nasty and don't want to die and want to murder someone? Shoot, yeah. So that's a great question, and there's so many questions contained in it. Here's what's not controversial. There are many places where one can try to find a foothold or a handhold to debate some materialist assumptions and then try to open the door to something that many people in science and philosophy at the moment would consider spooky or theological or just unwarranted. So the central drift of your question is fairly uncontroversial in science, which is to say, it's safe to assume that everything we know and notice about the mind from the first person side, as a matter of experience, what it's like to be us all of that is a product of what our brains, as physical information processing systems, are doing, right? So our brains are essentially computers made of meat. Although they're they're not computers that are all that similar to the computers we currently call computers. I mean, they're different and important ways. Many people will point out that science has been repeatedly confounded by bad analogies, that we used to make analogies to water pumps and steam engines. And now we no longer do that because now we have a much better analogy a computer. But many people will be tempted to argue that it's still not a perfect analogy or not even a good one. No, but the important thing is that intelligence is basically the ability to problem solve, negotiate the world. And obviously those things, if they work, they're favored and they're passed on and it presumably gets better and better or it doesn't work or it's a dead end or whatever. Yeah, I get that, and it starts worrying me. I came from a science background and I went to do philosophy. So all the things like determinism and materialism, all those things, I sucked them up. Anything that felt a little bit new AG nonsense, mumbo jumbo, magic, I sort of rejected, but I kept no mind. I said, well, prove it to me. I am this sort of this hardwired contingent. I need proof. I need physical proof. And so even consciousness freaks me out because, yeah, it should because really we don't understand it physically yet and there are impressive impediments to doing that. I think the so called hard problem of consciousness is genuinely hard because it's not clear why anything we do as minds, all of our behavior, all of our mental behavior, everything, including our intelligence needs to be associated with experience, right? We could build robots and we undoubtedly will build robots eventually that pass the Turing Tests that are indistinguishable from humans and in fact only become distinguishable from humans by their superhuman capacities. They will be as intelligent as we are in every respect. They'll be conversant with our emotions and display emotions of their own because we will program them that way, very likely, at least some of them that way. And I think it's true to say they're already as good. They might even be better at facial recognition than humans are now. And that will eventually include detecting and responding to our emotions and just so much of what makes us effective social beings. Millions of years of evolution as social primates and 300,000 years or so of finishing school as Homo sapiens. We're very good at this, and there's no question we're going to build machines that are better than we are. And then literally everything we do cognitively will be like chess, where it will be true to say that the best mind at that is now a computer mind, not a human one. We will never be the best at chess ever again. Right? Yeah. And that's going to be true of looking at a person's face and deciding how they feel. Will there be a robot, right, that's bigger and taller and stronger than me, right. Made of steel that can see in the dark and he's a better stand up. The robots are coming for your job. I'll always love that. I'll go out, I'll fall over and the crowd will go wild. They go, look at him. They're going to look at that fat bloke. He's dying. And the robot will go, I can't compete with that. I never thought of that. Ricky and the steam engine. But, Nelly, I think it's true if ultimately something like that has to be true if intelligence and even comedic intelligence and comedic timing and everything that gets built into that empathy, I learned it. I learned it was still my brain. Yeah, exactly. If that's just information processing, there's no reason why a human has to be the best at that forever. And in fact, there's no way one will be if we just keep making progress building intelligent machines. So I think that I totally accept that. I suppose my question is, then what it comes down to is why this illusion of free will? Is it the same as if it wasn't an illusion? What's the difference? That's my question. I totally accept it. But so what? We are what we are, what does it matter? What does it matter that there isn't free will? I mean, the reason why it's important is that so much of our psychological suffering personally and so much of our social suffering in terms of what we, the ethical and legal decisions we make, is anchored to this illusion. The feeling that you are you and really responsible for you. It's not that it's never useful. It's useful in certain cases. But the fact that we put people in prison for the rest of their lives or even, you know, give them the death penalty in certain states and my country and feel totally justified in doing it as a matter of punishment, not as a matter of social necessity, that we have to just keep certain dangerous people off the streets, which obviously and I think that's quite different. Yeah, it is different. And I'd say what I'd say with them, I think to and I know you're not saying this, but to say no one has free will, so no one should be punished, is a nonsense. Rather like if a machine breaks down in a factory, you don't go, well, it didn't mean to break down. We keep it on you get rid of it because that's a new one. It's not a punishment. Well, we got to still protect the innocent and I get that and I think, yeah, definitely something else. There's loads of punishment certainly makes sense still in many cases, but retribution doesn't, or the vengeance part of it doesn't morally. Once you swallow this pill of free will being an illusion, what are the three reasons for retribution? Rehabilitation and what's the restitution? Yeah. Have you read Ted Hondrick's book on no punishment? I think it's called it might be called Eye for an Eye. No, I think it's just called punishment. It's got a picture of an eye and a tooth on it was my professor. Oh, yeah. He told me about four years ago. I was I was sold on it as he strode, rather. And yeah, he breaks down why that sort of punishment for retribution doesn't work. And, you know, we totally agree with and, you know, with the death penalty, you can't go back and say, we were wrong. We know the worries about that. My point is, even if everyone understood freewill was an illusion, we're hard to work. I don't think it should make any difference because we're not saying, oh, we came from a tough background, or it was a crime of passion. We're just saying, we're all robots, let's do what we like, which we know isn't acceptable. That's why I mean that it doesn't make a difference. All the other caveats would still be in place. A sympathetic judicial system and acts utilitarian as opposed to rule utilitarianism. All those things will still be in place. But what I can never accept is the people that say, if hard determinism is true, no one is responsible for their actions are the societe or level. That's the difference I'm making. Once you view people in this vein as akin to malfunctioning robots, right. If we built an evil robot, it would reliably produce evil. Nature has built evil robots for us as psychopaths and other people who just reliably create a lot of harm for everyone else. The question is, how should we feel about that? And whether hatred is the right emotional response. Now, it's a totally natural response, certainly if you've been victimized by such a person, but I think we should treat it like any other force that isn't our fault. You don't you go you don't go into morality of an angry bear exactly. Trying to attack you in the woods. Right? He came from a tough background. I love angry, but if a bear is attacking me, I don't care about his home problem. But he did come from a tough background. He came from the background of being a bear. Right. What else was he going to do? And I don't care when it's whether should I rehabilitate this bear? If I can't get out of there, I try and stop him it's not a moral issue. It's the fact that I don't deserve to die by a bear yet that's when it comes down to I love bears, I love bears. I've never heard of bear. I absolutely love them and good luck to them, and they've got to do what they've got to do. But as I say, if he's in my apartment, I've got other words, I don't care. Yeah, I don't know where that analogy goes. What I'm saying is the psychopath is part of nature, like the bear. I know it's not his fault it's a psychopath. Just like it's fault that it's a hungry bear. But that's no reason for me not to try and stop things. We've got things, but you don't have to hate it. And you wouldn't hate it in the same way you'd hate a person. And that's the crucial piece for me. That's a very good point. Ethically. Right. Even if it harmed you. I don't know if you got to that part in my in my I know you heard some of the audio from Waking Up, where I talk about free will, but just imagine the two cases. One case you're attacked by a bear, and let's say you lose a hand, so you really are you've had a terrifying encounter with near death, but you're saved and the bear gets tranquilized and let's say it gets put in the zoo. Right? Yeah, that's one case. The other case is you're you're attacked by an evil person and suffer the same injury. Right? Yeah. And so that but then the question is, what is your subsequent mental state? No, you're right. For the rest of your life, you could be hating the person and fantasizing over killing that person with your bare hands or hand. But with the bear, you might especially if he laughed in court. Yeah. He could just play upon your hominid emotions so that you would really hate him, you know, and want to kill him and fantasize. Totally true. Yeah. Yeah. Because we've got a sense of self and morality and we feel what's right and wrong. Yeah. We impose that on another human where we wouldn't do it on the bear. Rather in the way if I walk into a tree and I sprake my nose, I do not hate that tree. You hate yourself. I hate myself. And when the council put a fence down, I would want someone to blame. I want someone to blame with the weather if it rains, who didn't tell me to bring out whose job was it? Yeah, that's true. That's a very good point. And it's hard to forgive another human who hurts you for fun, even though in a naturalistic framework, they can't help it. I'm putting quote marks around help it. But we mean it literally as well, don't we, if we're determinist. And honestly, that does help me now a fair amount psychologically. I mean, there's so many people out there on social media in particular who this is where I tend to see it. I don't see it in my life who just maliciously attack me and attack people who are associated with me in any way. And it's, Why am I talking to you? There good luck on social media after this. I don't know anything about I thought you were super popular. I don't like Sam. I'm asking him. I'm using him, if anything. That's all, guys. If you're listening, that's a very good point. It's much easier to process when you actually recognize that certain people are doing what they do, because that's what they do. They're like bears. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there's lots of other factors on social media getting noticed, wanting, being part of someone else called aware of heckling, they're not like that in real life. They ask you for an autograph. All these things their fault. I get it, really. If someone sends a nasty tweet I think I've told you this before that I thought, Why? They said that. And I look back and they've sent 20 nice ones, but I didn't notice them. And I think I put this line in afterlife as well. Why would people rather want to be famous for being an asshole than not famous? What is the attraction of being famous? Saying, I was here because cavemen used to put their hand on the wall and blow wood over it, and I was here, and now it's obviously got out of hand, but I think it's some sort of cachet for eternal life. I think that's a very human worrying quest. What's the point? What will happen after I die? Will people remember me? Will myself carry on? Will I come back as a spirit? Is there heaven? Have I led a good life? Was it worth it? Will I come back as a cow? I think all those things, as irrational as they all are, are very human. And I don't know why. I don't know. Again, they could be upshots, but yeah, all right. Well, we can work that out after you've had your third bath of the day. I'm going to have a tea now. So in conclusion, yes, robots, computers will soon be indistinguishable humans. Final question. Is there a chimp somewhere that sat down and looked up and thought, where do we come from? Who did all this? Where are we going? Has that happened here? As a chimp thought, what the fuck is going on here? I would highly doubt that, but the interesting thing is that there are certain things we do that are really crucial to our being smart, like, you know, working memory, which chimps are better at, which is pretty. And you can you can see this display there. We could find this video on YouTube where, given a memory task, where there's a keyboard, like a keyboard on a screen and many numbers and letters suddenly get illuminated and then you have to recapitulate. You have to press all the right keys. Yeah. Chimps are so fast and so much better at it than humans that it really is. It's kind of terrifying. Have you seen that experiment that shows it's not just the arbitrary test, it's the reward that has a sensory so they did a thing with a chimp with beads. So if it chose the small pile of beads, it got a jelly bean. Right. It got it right every time. Choose the smallest pile, get a jelly bean. When they gave it the choice to choose the smallest pile of jelly beans, it didn't. It chose the big pile of jelly beans because it wanted all the jelly. The experiment was out of the window. It just went fuck that. That's the big pilot. Jenny Bean. That's hilarious. Isn't that great? That's fantastic. That's a genius. Now I don't have a sense of self and I want to be a chimp. Brilliant. Cheers, man. Cheers. See you later./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with the philosopher Thomas Metzinger. Thomas is a full professor and director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group and the Research group on Neuroethics and Neurophilosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. He is the founder and director of the Mind Group and adjunct fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, also in Germany. His research centers on the analytic philosophy of mind and applied ethics and the philosophy of cognitive science, and he is the editor and author of several books. He edited The Neural Correlates of Consciousness and he wrote Being No One and the Ecotunnel. And in addition to Being a Philosopher of Mind, thomas is also a long term meditator. So, as you can hear, we have many, many interests in common. Our conversation starts on a political note, the significance of World War II for the history of ideas, and the connection between Nietzsche and the Holocaust. Thomas gives us the German view of current US. Politics, but then we go deep into questions of consciousness and the self. We talk about the role of intuition in science, the ethics of building conscious AI, the self as a hallucination, how we identify with our thoughts, and the paradox of doing that attention as the root of the felt sense of self, and the place of Eastern philosophy in Western science, as well as the limitations of secular humanism. So it's a very rich conversation, and it is the conversation that many of you asked for. Many of you have requested that I get Thomas on the podcast, so I bring you Thomas Metzinger. I am here with Thomas Metzinger. Thomas, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to meet you. Yeah, we've never met, but I have followed you for some time now. I've been a happy reader of your books and the anthologies you've edited. You've done really great work in the philosophy of mind, and this has been an area that I've been interested in for some time. We might have been at the same conference at some point and just didn't get a chance to meet, but it's a pleasure to meet you virtually. I've had to live with emails by people telling me, thomas, Sam Harris, this guy is like you. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. All right, so, Thomas, tell our listeners what your focus has been in philosophy in general. And what work you're doing now. And then we're going to get into, obviously, questions of consciousness and AI and the self and all your areas of interest. But how do you summarize what you do as a philosopher at this point? Well, my core competence is in something that's called analytical philosophy of mind. That's where I come from. Done that for about three decades. But one thing that is special about me is that I have done it in very strong cooperation with neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, AI people for about 30 years. So my job has been to open up analytical philosophy of mind for a deeper and more productive interdisciplinary cooperation. It's got a lot of resistance for this in my life. It was bad for my academic career. But now, five years younger, there were four people in Germany like myself, and now it's just like a people's movement. All of the good young philosophers have one empirical area, like dreaming, social cognition, predictive coding, where they're really good and they combine this. But in this country, I got all the resistance. What form did the Resistance take and what specifically was it focused on? Many different types. First, in Germany, philosophy has very strongly meant history of philosophy. Secondly, something like naturalism has always had a bad press. People who thought, at least I have learned this as a student, that empirical sciences could contribute anything like bottom up constraints for conceptual work, just hadn't understood what philosophy was in the first place because it was purely a priori theorizing. But then there's also this territorial thing. I think you have recently had, for instance, to take this example of a freedom of the will debate too. We had a very hot one a little earlier in the public, and a typical event was that prominent neuroscientists said there is no such thing as freedom of the will. And it got to a point where philosophers said, listen, this is not to be decided and hard sciences at all. This is a philosophical problem, and there will be a philosophical solution. And then my friends from the neuroscience said, you're beginning to understand it. It's not your problem anymore. We have solved it. And then all of the humanities just rose in protest. So it's also a question who is allowed to answer which questions? So you introduced yourself as an analytic philosopher that is usually contrasted with continental philosophy. Has the European commitment to what is known perhaps mostly in the States, as continental philosophy? Is that part of the problem here? It's part of the problem. Now there is pretty much of a peaceful coexistence. It has gone through many stages. But you must also see the historical situation. In World War Two. We have either murdered or driven out of the country. All of the Jewish intelligentsia, so many teacher disciple relationships were completely cut off. And I'm very grateful to the generation of analytical philosophers who came before me to reconnect us to the global discussion again, to mankind's philosophical conversation. That was something that had to be established first after World War II because there were many people who thought the hottest and most recent stuff is heidegger who had more than a superficial connection with the trends that got so many people murdered and exiled. Of course. Yeah. Well, so that's a fascinating moment of intellectual history, and it's not something I'm sure someone has written about it in Germany, but in English. I haven't read much about the way in which the war affected philosophy, but it's interesting to picture those teacher student relationships being severed and Germany becoming isolated as a result. Well, there are many deeper dimensions to it. I mean, one is every German child at one age discovers what has happened. I still very precisely know the moment when I discovered the atrocities my tribe had connected. I don't know if you want to hear the story. I would love to, but how old are you, Thomas? I'm 59. How old were you? I was ten. And this little scholar in me was awakening, and I was getting interested in the books in my parents shelves. And I saw there was one book that put up very high because they didn't want me to see it. And of course, the next time they were out, I put a chair on my father's writing desk and crept up there and with a photo book called The Yellow Star. And I saw bulldozers pushing piles of corpses into mass grapes. And I saw photo documentation of medical experiments on Jews with phosphor burning away the flesh and stuff like this. And that was the moment when my childhood ended. Until then, I was living in a world of cowboys and Indians and fairy tales, and I didn't know that something like this existed in reality. So as you grow up, when I was 16 years old, I was still firmly and honestly convinced that I had been born in the worst country of the whole world with that tribe, with that history. And there's this aftermath where you ask your parents, how much did you know? And they all tell you, we didn't know anything. And then you ask the other school children in the schoolyard, and they all say, my parents also say they didn't know anything of this. And then you asked your history teacher, and they said they tell you, don't let yourselves be fooled. Almost everybody knew. At what point in school do children begin to learn about the Holocaust? Is it somewhere between ten and 16, or is there a standard year where there's I wouldn't know the curricula? Maybe 1415. You get it in history at that time. And then I'm coming back to philosophy. Of course, young intellectuals, if you study philosophy, for us, the whole thing was completely different than for you, because we were all trying to find out what's in our own intellectual tradition made this possible. Where did this come from? Nietzsche the Genealogy of Morals because we have been a great philosophical nation with German idealism and everything, and then a very urgent question is how could this happen? So studying philosophy meant something else for us? Yes, it's like an intellectual and moral autopsy. Did you come up with any answers there, or are there any answers that are agreed upon? How was it possible? Well, there's a century long European tradition of antisemitism, and what many people don't know in this year is that Martin Luther, for instance, was a hate pundit. He was the first person to explicitly in his writing say that the synagogues have to burn. And what many people also don't know is that the Vice Christina actually was a birthday present for Luta, who had his birthday. It was like celebrating a birthday party into his birthday. It was a gift the Nazis made to the founder of Protestantism. So there's a deep connection to the Church over the centuries, but then there's also plain old racism and some philosophical contributions. The story on Nietzsche, as far as I know, is that basically he was misused by his sister and the Nazis and that his philosophy really is only in its misinterpretation something that could be useful to the worldview of Nazism. I must say I've never been totally convinced of that, given some of the ranting one encounters in Nietzsche. What's your view of that? That's, of course, a long story, but of course he couldn't be a fascist and he couldn't be a Nazi because he couldn't be that. I also technically, I don't regard him as a philosopher because he, in my view, doesn't have a serious interest in the growth of knowledge. She's more a racist writer. But if you look at The Genealogy of Morals and you imagine you're a young German, then what you take away from it is we are a warrior race. The Jews are smarter than we are. The Jews have come up with something, I'm quoting, to poison our blood. They are poisoning our blood with Christian morals and they have done this. And the only thing we can do is remember that we are stronger. Not smarter, but stronger, because we are a warrior race. So we have to get rid of this Christian moral of the slaves and so forth. And that was, of course, a preparation, because imagine you're a young intellectual at that time, and this is presented to you as one of your best philosophers. That was dangerous and that was not innocent, and that was certainly a preparation for what came afterwards. But that's fascinating. I wanted to just go again, this is a topic I was not aware we were going to stumble on, but I just I can't leave it. This is great. It's not often I get a direct window onto this experience, or that people even have this experience. So your description of what it was like to be a child stumbling upon that book and the evidence of the Holocaust that had not yet reached you. And then the experience of talking about this with parents and friends who talk about it with their parents and getting a kind of denial, really it sounds like a blanket denial that anyone was aware at the time what was happening. And yet the official story from your historians and your teachers of history is no, of course, more or less everyone knew this was happening and the whole culture is complicit on some level. How do you reconcile those two pieces? Because in terms of Germany's reputation, it is much more of the latter sort that Germany has quite famously really lived in a kind of purgatory of self criticism since World War II in a way that Austria hasn't and Japan hasn't. In Austria and Japan you have a more or less official denial of just how morally dark their behavior became. But with Germany, everyone seems to acknowledge that there has been an impressive and perhaps even sufficient degree of hand wringing over the Holocaust and over World War II. But it sounds like your experience is one of where the grown ups are more or less living in total denial about that. How do you square those two things? Well, the last witnesses are dying right now. Many have finished their lives in denial. They have also been psychologically traumatized. For instance, my father had to go to war with 17 and he wrote a book about things he couldn't talk about. They have seen horrible things as children. And he told me when they saw 800 American airplanes fly over the Rhine Valley in broad daylight, using the Rhine Valley, and counted them as children, and they came back without their bomb load. And then it was the first time that dawned on them that they might not be winning this war like everybody told them. So actually I didn't want to go this direction at all. But now it, of course, connects to Trump and your political situation because I think as a German we can bring a unique perspective onto what you are living through right now. So I'm so very grateful for the US, for the thousands of beautiful young men that you have sacrificed, you know, to defeat the generation of my grandfather and my father. You brought us democracy, the Marshall Plan and everything. And now see how this has played out 70 years later. You are lying on the ground in a very serious situation and we are one of the most stable democracies in the whole world. It's completely bizarre to be a German right now. Everybody is tapping on your shoulder and saying, hey, you are the leaders of the civilized world now. Are you aware of this? Do something. All the young people come to Germany want to study here. The financial criminals from London are starting to relocate to Frankfurt. Even the southern Italian mafia is in Stoke Garden in southern Germany. Everybody likes it. Everybody thinks this is one of the most stable countries in the world. And now on the other side of it, everything is crumbling apart 70 years later on the other side of the Atlantic. And one of the many things I think we can bring to the table is there will be an aftermath. And you should think about this too. Trump is not going to last very long, but there will be an aftermath to this. Children will ask their parents questions. What have you voted? Have you stood your ground? What have you done? Daddy? Where were you in these decisive years? This is not going to be over. When it's over, there will be a deep intergenerational rift in this society, and it will be a major threat to social cohesion that you may need decades to get over. So there will be an aftermath to this bizarre Trump episode right now, and you better think about it now how you want to go about it, and then there will be no aftermath to climate change. Climate change is going to go on for centuries. Even in the best possible scenario. There is not going to be this episode is not going to be over. And, you know, the US are now what I would call a climate rogue state. They are completely isolated from the rest of mankind. And, you know, your children and grandchildren will have to deal with that too. And it's difficult. We just went through this the last 70 years. Yeah, it's interesting to hear that perspective. I can tell you that. What you just said about how dire it appears from the German point of view that we have elected a person like Trump to run this country, that will seem like sheer delusion to anyone. Who is at all sympathetic with Trump, or at least thought Clinton was terrible enough that it was just kind of an ordinary judgment call to pick Trump over her. And it will seem hyperbolic, I think, to most people who are even worried about Trump. I don't want to spend any real time on him because I don't know how much you've listened to this podcast, but I probably have 20 hours of me shrieking about Trump on this podcast, and even those who agree with me are probably sick of it by now. So I have to sort of pick my moments here on this topic. But I take your point. I think happily, with all the chaos that we see in the US government at the moment, there hasn't been much concrete consequence to Trump's tenure and his incompetence and his narcissism, the way in which he's eroded the norms of our politics and civil society. It's been a fairly quiet period in human history, despite the fact that North Korea keeps testing ICBMs and Russia keeps hacking the electoral process of democracies throughout the west. But I completely take your point that there's no telling how bad it could get with a person like him in charge. I'm not at all complacent on that topic. And insofar as I can do anything on this podcast, I have made noise about this to the limits of even my fans patience. But I want to move on to topics of our mutual philosophical concern and scientific concern, because there's just so much to talk about here. Well, may I just briefly interrupt before we leave that topic all together? I went to your website when I got all these emails and said, okay, this looks good, but it's probably one of these American self marketing robots. And then I had no time to read any of your books. Now you invited me, and during workouts I now have listened to many of your podcasts, and I think you're doing a great job, and it's fantastic. And in bringing up this ugly hobby horse again and again, I just want to say one thing, and then we can leave the topic. Because we are not completely impartial and we have egotistic motives to I don't want to insult anybody, but it's one thing if you guys wreck down your own country completely. That's one thing. It's far away. But the other thing is, of course, we all know The Moron is hard to predict. I don't know who he will pick a fight with, but I'm very much afraid that he underestimates China when he wants to incinerate North Korea or something like this. And this is a very dangerous situation, and I find this is the last thing I want to say. Now we can leave that topic. I never thought that I would have thought something like this. But my hope is actually with the higher ranks of the American military. I know that there are some very conservative people who are decent, who have some decency. And I think that's our main hope now, that if the day has come peacefully take him out of office and do not follow that order. I think that's the people we have to hope for now, and that there are some senior persons, maybe, who have combat experience and who know what that really means, that that is not a golf course in Florida or something like that, and that they will act. Yeah, well, obviously you as a German and a scholar of the relevant history, are in a good position to warn our society what it means to elect somebody who is not disposed to pay attention to constitutional or democratic norms. Germany in particular is aware of just how, as Timothy Snyder, the historian, said on this podcast, just how people go to the polls not knowing that they're voting away their freedom or that they're voting for the last time. And yet this is an experience that democracies have had, and we haven't had that in the US. There is an assumption that our institutions are strong enough and that the stakes are always low enough that nothing terrible will happen when we put a selfish imbecile of this magnitude in charge. But I just think it's not a safe assumption. And I've expressed my my worries again, more or less ad nauseam on this podcast, but I hope he gets reined in by everything that can rein him in, and the military professionals included. So, Thomas, let's start with consciousness. We have questions of intellectual and moral interest that will outlive us, and they outlived Plato, they outlived the Buddha, they outlived everyone who has touched them, and I think they will endure. But the mystery of consciousness. How do you think about consciousness? Well, I've been in this for 30 years now. You may know that I'm one of the people who founded the association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 22 years ago. I think the first thing we have to understand that consciousness is not one problem, but that it's a whole bundle of problems, some more conceptual, some more empirical. And that's the first step. It's not that one big mystery out there. There's attention, there's sensory discrimination. There are conceptual issues about what may be conceivable and so forth. And I think the consciousness community in the last two decades has really made breathtaking progress. We're getting somewhere. And in this one popular book, The Egotunnel, I've actually predicted that by 2050 we will have the global neural correlate of consciousness. We will isolate that in humans, and that's only a very first step. But I think it will not be a mystery. Life is not a mystery anymore. But 150 years ago, many people thought that this is an irreducible mystery. So you're you're not a fan anymore, if you ever were, of the framing by David Tralmers of the hard problem of consciousness. No, that's so boring. I mean, that's last century. We all respect Dave and we know he's very smart and has got a very fast mind. There's no debate about that. But conceivability arguments are just very weak. If you have an ill defined folk psychological umbrella term like consciousness, then you can pull off all kinds of scenarios and zombie thought experiments. It helped to clarify some issues in the mid 90s, but the consciousness community has listened to this and just moved on. I mean, nobody of the serious researchers in the field thinks about this anymore, but it has taken on like a focaluristic life of its own, as a lot of people talk about the heart problem, who wouldn't be able to state what it consists of. Now, maybe we should just state it just so that those listeners who didn't hear me speak with David on the podcast or haven't read my book Waking Up. Basically, the issue is this that consciousness, if you define it as to follow Thomas Nagel here, the fact that it's like something to be what you are, the fact that a brain of sufficient complexity or a creature at a certain point in evolutionary terms, has a subjective qualitative perspective on the world. The lights go on this formulation. There have been many variants of it, but famously, the philosopher Thomas nagel wrote a paper, very influential paper in the early 70s titled what is it like to be a bat? And he said, we may never know. A bat experience could be totally unlike our own, but if it is like something to be a bat, if you switch places with a bat, that wouldn't be synonymous with just the canceling of experience, but you would be laid bare to a different domain of experience. Well, that is the fact of consciousness. In the case of a bat, whether we ever understand it or not, the fact that the lights are on, the fact that there is a perspectivable qualitative character there, that is what we mean by consciousness. And I've always thought that that is a good definition. It doesn't answer any of what Chalmers called the easy problems of consciousness. Those are separate. How does the eye and the visual cortex transduce light energy into a visual mapping of the visual scene? The hard problem on Chalmers'account is always this bit, the fact that it's like something to do any of that, because it's the transition from unconscious scene, which human brains do and robots do, to the conscious experience of seeing, which we know humans accomplish. And at the moment, there's no good reason to think our robots or computers do. And a corollary to this framing is that any explanation we get about consciousness. Let's just say we open the back of the book of nature and we get the right answer about consciousness, and it turns out that you need exactly 10,000 information processing units of a certain character. They have to be wired in a certain way, they have to be firing at a certain hurts. And just lo and behold, that is what gives you consciousness. And if you change any of those parameters, well, then the lights go out. Let's say we knew that to be true. It still wouldn't explain the emergence of consciousness in a way that is intuitively graspable. It still would seem like a miracle. And that's not the way most or really any satisfying scientific explanation works out. When I give you an explanation for any higher level property, the fluidity of water or the brittleness of glass in terms of its micro constituents, well, then that explanation actually does run through and conserves your intuitions about how things function at a lower level so as to appear as they do on a higher level. And so it is, I would argue, even with the example you just gave of life. So you said that 100 years ago or even less, 70 years ago, perhaps. Let me get my dates right. It's more like 80 years ago. People felt that we would never have a satisfactory explanation of what life is or how life, the energy of life relates to physical structure and how heredity could be a mere mechanism and how the healing of disease or from wounds could be just a matter of chemistry. But of course, with the the advent of molecular biology and other insights, we figured all of that out without really without remainder and and therefore vitalism or a notion that there has to be any kind of life spirit in matter that has gone out the window. That's another analogy that doesn't really get at how mysterious consciousness is because something like reproduction or growth or healing from injury that really can be explained. Mechanistically and and our intuitions run through there. So the conceivability issue for me with the hard problem isn't so much a statement about what is true. It's not that I doubt that consciousness can be an emergent property of information processing because it's so difficult to conceive or impossible to conceive how that works, but it is just a statement about the seeming limits of explanation. It sounds to me that whatever you put in the space provided will still sound like the restatement of a miracle. Which is it really analogous to how to take an analogy to cosmology the idea that everything, including the laws of nature, emerged out of nothing, right? Like just things exploded into being. Now, that may in fact be true, but I would argue, or at least it seems to me, that it's inconceivable or uninterpretable or it's not understandable. It's the statement of a miracle. And so that's really my fondness for the hard problem is a matter of epistemology more than it is ontology. Beautiful. You've now mentioned so many important points that I don't really know where to start. So maybe we should just say technically the hard problem is that phenomenal properties only nomologically superven on functional properties, but not logically. That is, the conscious properties of sweetness or redness or whatever the bat perceives is determined by information flow in its brain in this world, under the laws of nature holding in this world. But there are other worlds where we can imagine that the bed is a zombie with exactly that information flow in its brain that there could always be a functional isomorph to sam, right? Some entity that has the same functions on a certain level of granularity but which instantiates no phenomenal properties. Thomas, I want to jump in here for 1 second because I want people to understand the distinctions you're making. And you used some terms that will lose most people who are not philosophically trained. So I think you hit upon that consciousness nomologically supervenes upon the physical or something like that. You should unpack that and also nomologically means under the laws of nature holding in our universe. Now, there could be other universes, logically possible worlds in which these laws of nature do not hold. So the idea is that consciousness is determined from below, from the brain. May. Only hold in this world with these laws of nature, but it's not conceptually something that may hold across all possible worlds. That's the idea that that is the mystery that you are trying to isolate. That the mystery consists of the fact that we can always imagine that Sam Harris is a zombie, that he would talk, he would even talk about his emotions and his color experiences, but he would not have any inner perspective. That's the idea. Well, I would strike a slightly different emphasis here, Thomas, just to catch people up. There's this argument that is a I don't know if it originates with Chalmers, and he certainly made good use of it in his book, but this idea that we can conceive of a zombie, which is a beam that functions and appears exactly like a human being, but has no conscious experience the lights are not on in a zombie. It's just a perfectly humanoid robot that has no subjectivity or qualitative experience. Now, the fact that we can imagine such a thing does not even slightly suggest that such a thing is possible. It just may be that in order to get something that functions like a human being and seems like a human being from the outside, consciousness is always going to be necessary or will always come along for the ride. And I'm just agnostic as to whether or not that's the case. And I think as we develop AI, we may learn more and more about whether or not that's the case, or cease to find it intellectually interesting. So I'm not arguing from the side of it's conceivable that there could be a zombie Sam, and therefore there's a hard problem of consciousness. It's more that whatever I imagine the explanation to be, the idea that first the lights are not on and then they come on by virtue of some complexity in the system, some complexity doesn't explain anything. Complexity is not good. But then you can keep change, I mean, you keep changing the, the noun, whether it's information integration or so whatever the answer is, and there have been various answers proffered in recent decades, it still sounds like just a brute fact that doesn't actually explain anything. And again, it's not the way other scientific explanations, even with respect to life function. Well, the last point may not be right, but what you're actually getting at is what is the value of intuitions? Can we demand of a good theory of consciousness that it gives us an intuitive feeling? This is right, now I've understood it. We would never ask this of a theoretical physicist. If they tell us something about eleven dimensions and string theory, nobody would say this is completely counterintuitive, this has nothing to do with my life world, this is just brute facts. They're stipulating, we just trust these people. They know maths, they have theories with high predictive power, they're very smart, and we don't demand this intuition. I would say we actually do. This has been famously what has been so unsatisfying about quantum mechanics, which is that no one, not even Richard Feynman, can pretend to understand it. All the physicists can say is that the math works out and it has immense predictive value. But it's still that is enough. It could be enough. It could be enough. And I take your point about the limit of intuition, in that our intuitions were not designed by evolution for us to grasp reality as it is. Our intuitions were designed to avoid getting hit over the head by another ape or to mate with his sister. Our intuitions are very crude, but again, we use certain intuitions that we have, you know, whether mathematical or otherwise, to leverage ourselves into areas where our intuitions, our common sense intuitions, and certainly our folk psychological intuitions, are not good. So I can certainly follow you there, but it still just seems to be the case that consciousness provides some kind of extra impediments here. So take something like platform independence. So, like, if we assume that there's nothing magical about having a computer made of meat, and consciousness is as, mind is as, intelligence is clearly platform independent, and therefore, we could, in principle, build conscious computers that were non. Biological. How would we move, in your view, from having characterized the neural correlate of consciousness in people into being confident that the computers that seem to emulate that functionally and informationally are themselves conscious? What I'm imagining the future of AI will very likely look like is that we will build computers that pass the Turing Test with flying colors, whether or not we've figured out the neural correlate of consciousness in apes like ourselves, we will build computers that pass the Turing Test and that seem conscious to us. But unless we fully understand how consciousness emerges, we won't know whether they're conscious. They might say they're conscious. They might seem even more conscious than we are, and we will sort of lose sight of the problem. And I know you think that, as I do, that the fact of the matter, whether or not they are conscious, is hugely important, ethically speaking. And it would be monstrous to create computers that could suffer. So let's perhaps bring the platform independence issue into this conversation. And I know I've been talking a lot. I just want to kind of give you the full landscape of my prejudice and confusion so that you can run over it. No, it's all very interesting, and of course, I fully understand what you mean, but we have to think about intuitions a little bit. They have a long evolutionary history. If I have an intuition that an explanation is satisfactory, it is itself a kind of conscious experience. I don't know if you've ever thought about this. There's not only a phenomenology of redness. There's also a phenomenology of I just know this, but I don't know for what reason. I know it or where the knowledge comes from. And in many cases, intuitive knowledge is fantastic. It comes from condenses knowledge from the world of our ancestors. Just think about social cognition. If you have to set this intuition this guy is dangerous, or she is a good person, this is a way of computing itself. It doesn't generate senses in your head, but intuitions. Now, the question is, could we ever be intuitively satisfied? I think we cannot, because our theory of consciousness will also tell us what a self is and what a first person perspective is. And that is something we will not be able to ever grasp intuitively, what's coming out of there. But to come back to your question, you know that for a number of years I've strictly argued against even risking phenomenal states in machines. We should in no way try attempt to create conscious machines or even get close because we might cause a cascade of suffering. We might just increase the overall amount of suffering in the universe. And just because of this reason, it's very important to have a theory of consciousness. We must have one. So what would we do if we have a goal or a correlate of consciousness? That was your question. The hardware doesn't matter. We need to know the flow of information. What is the computation that is carried out? Then we have to describe this on the right level of conceptual granularity, meaning what corresponds to my experience of redness, what in that information flow is minimally sufficient for my intuition that we will never understand consciousness, what is minimally sufficient for my sense of selfhood, and so forth. And if we have that mapping from our own phenomenology to fine grain computational descriptions, then we can see, is this instantiated in a machine or not? The problem rather, is that machines could have forms of suffering or forms of selfhood that we cannot even grasp because they are so alien and so different from our biological form of conscious experience or emotion. Maybe they would develop it and we wouldn't see it. Maybe it is already there and we wouldn't discover it. So there's certainly a great problem across spaces, spaces of conscious experience. Just as with the bat, you're never going to understand what does it feel like to be the Bat? I mean, to hear the echo of your own ultrasonic calls is it like hearing I've heard people say, no, it's the dominant modality for the bad, it's for the Bat, it's like seeing other people say no, it's scanning a surface. It must be a tactile experience. For the bad, it's like feeling a surface to fly through that echo. And that is, if it has data formats, as I call it, internal data formats that we don't have in sensory processing. That is something we will never know how it feels to instantiate these data formats. And that may be happening with your machines as well. Right. Just on this point of echolocation. I don't know if this is analogous to what a bad experience is but contrary to what most people assume, we can echo locate to some degree. If you just hold your hand in front of your face and hum and then move your hand back and forth, you will notice that your humming reveals to you the location of your hand. So you can be a very bad bat if you want to try this at home. So let's talk about the self because you raised the topic of the self which is another thing that people find inscrutable and it of course relates to consciousness and yet it is quite different. And you have written a lot about the self and I haven't read everything you've written. But I feel like there's some significant agreement here between the way we view it and the way even traditional views that one meets in the east, like in Buddhism or advice of Vedanta, that the self, as most people conceive of it, is an illusion. So I put that to you. I think we want to distinguish between the whole person. And I would not say that people are illusions, but most people are walking around with a sense that they have a self inside their heads, that there's a subject in the head, a thinker of thoughts and experiencer of experience. This is kind of an unchanging rider on the horse of consciousness that just gets carried through from one moment to another and has various adventures but is in some sense never quite changed by them. It's the center of the whole drama. How do you think about the self and in what sense are people confused about it? Well, when I looked at the problem of consciousness I thought if I was an antireductionist the most interesting, the most pressing problem is what is a first person perspective and what would it mean for any information processing system to have a sense of selfhood and a first person perspective originating from it? This is the really difficult problem to solve, I think. And I have just as you been guilty of this illusion talk in popular writings in the past of course it is conceptual nonsense to say the self is an illusion because as a term, illusion means that there is a sensory misrepresentation of something where an outside stimulus actually exists. A hallucination is something where there's no stimulus and you still have a misrepresentation. But this sense of selfhood is only partly a sensory experience. Of course. It is grounded in what I call the intraceptive self model in inner sensations, in the body, in effective tone, in the emotions, in elementary Bioregulation. All these are important layers. But we have this robust misrepresentation of transtemporal identity. And I have always firmly said, you know, this probably that none of your listeners ever was or had a self and that we can explain everything we want to scientifically explain about self consciousness in a much more passimonious way with much simpler explanations, assumptions, much simpler structural assumptions. So for me, the question is, in a system that very obviously has no immortal soul or no self, we don't find anything like that in the brain, how does this robust sense of selfhood emerge? Because that is really counterintuitive, right? Imagine people would try to believe that there is no such thing as itself. You cannot believe this. Even if you want to believe this, nobody can believe it. Well, let me stop you there, because I not only believe it, I experience it. I don't know if you have any significant experience with meditation or psychedelics or have you gone down that path to see if you could confirm any of the Buddha's claim here. Oh, I thought you knew that. I do. I don't know how far it's gone. Well, I'm if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, it has been two weeks since the election, and those of you who don't spend a lot of time on social media may not be seen how crazy it is out there. All I can say is we appear to be living through a very dangerous moment, and Trump and his enablers, in their desperation to hold onto power, are making our situation much more dangerous. I want to elaborate on something I tweeted after it became obvious that Biden had won the election. This was around November 6, I think. I wrote, there's a needle that we really must thread successfully. Contempt for Trump and his enablers in government is a patriotic necessity. Contempt for 70 million Trump voters is a serious error. Life is complicated. So I want to spell this out a little more because very few people are threading this needle successfully or even attempting to thread it. And some people have confused what I was saying there with people like AOC seeming to call for vengeance against Trump supporters. She went so far as to encourage people to keep lists of everyone who had supported Trump in any capacity. I think it's quite clear that nothing good is waiting for us down that path. Over 70 million people voted for Trump, and there are many reasons for people to have done this or to have found that they just couldn't vote for Biden. And Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of the division in our society. Now, he is not Stalin, he is not Hitler. He is a vindictive little con man who got plucked out of a carnival somewhere by Mark Burnett and put on television for over a decade. Trump is the quintessential American fake. And it's been astounding to watch such a bizarre and insubstantial person accomplish one crazy stage dive after the next because there were millions of upraised hands waiting to catch him and to bear his weight. So there are real social problems at the bottom of all this that we have to address, and we won't address any of them by writing off everyone who voted for Trump as racist or otherwise irredeemable. But there are many people in my circle, friends and colleagues and podcast guests, who are making the opposite error. Many of them are almost exclusively focused on the problem of the far left, and this is causing them to significantly discount the harm that Trump has caused and is actively causing to our society. Some of these people are Trump supporters, but many aren't. And they've been taking the Trump team's allegations that the election was stolen through massive voter fraud way too seriously. And they're extending a principle of charity to Trump and to the rest of his team that is frankly delusional. Again, there is a needle to thread here, and many people don't appear to even see it, insofar as I've noticed what others in the so called intellectual dark web have been saying, it's generally not something I want to be associated with. I don't want to single anyone out in particular, but allow me to take this moment to turn in my imaginary membership card to this imaginary organization. The IDW was always tongue in cheek from my point of view. It was a funny name for a group of people who were willing to discuss difficult topics in public, mostly on podcast. But it never made sense for us to be grouped together as though we shared a common worldview. I never saw much downside to it, and I didn't much think about it. But in the aftermath of this election, with some members of this fictional group sounding fairly bonkers, I just want to make it clear that I'm not part of any group, right? So if you want to criticize my ideas, that's great. But I only represent myself here, and no one else speaks for me. We have a crisis of legitimacy now on all fronts. People have lost their trust in our institutions, and this is understandable, given all that's happened over the last four years. Trust in media has almost collapsed. But that doesn't mean there still isn't a difference between The New York Times and Breitbart, or between journalists who are doing their best to report facts even while they harbor their own political biases. And political operatives are conspiracy theorists who are obviously spreading lies. So as bad as things are in mainstream media and don't get me wrong, they're quite bad you simply can't place equal blame on both sides. Politically, at this moment, we have a sit in president who is essentially a QAnon conspiracist. So if you find yourself saying things like, all politicians lie, or Biden is just as corrupt as Trump, you have become part of the problem of misinformation in our society. Biden would have to be a supporter of antifa and lying about literally everything to be comparable to Trump. Biden's next tweet would have to say something like, we have evidence that the CIA invented the Coronavirus to kill black people. He would have to be that maniacal in the whole Democratic Party along with him for there to be an equivalence between Trump and Biden or between Republicans and Democrats at this moment. Yes, there is influence peddling and bad incentives and opportunism and cowardice and the whole carnival of human error on both sides of our politics. But the Republican Party has become a personality cult devoted to a fake strongman who really is doing his best to undermine our democracy. So a special focus on Trump and his enablers is totally warranted right now. And again, there is a needle to thread here. There is a difference between Trump and his inner circle and his most abject supporters in Congress. There's a difference between these people who are attempting to hold onto power illegitimately by vomiting lies on everything in sight and the millions of people who voted for Trump who are, to one or another degree, taken in by these lies. Now, at the time I'm recording this, it seems safe to claim the following there appears to be no credible evidence of significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. And whatever the Trump campaign is bringing forward is being looked at by the courts. And so far, it's being thrown out by the courts. Ironically, because we have such an uncoordinated election system, it appears to be very difficult to manufacture fraud at scale. And what is being alleged here is massive fraud across many states, several of which have Republicans in key positions of power. And strangely, the Democrats are alleged to have rigged the election for president, but they didn't think to also win the Senate and to get rid of Mitch McConnell, and they lost seats in the House. So this election fraud was really a work of subtle genius. And needless to say, all the Republicans in Congress have celebrated their victories in the House and the Senate, and these votes were cast on the same ballots they're disputing in the presidential race. This is the very essence of incoherence and hypocrisy, just as it was when Trump's campaign began demanding that we stop counting ballots in states where he was ahead, while simultaneously demanding that we keep counting them in states where he was behind. There is now such a degradation of our politics that people don't even feel the need to lie coherently. It's just a continuous carpet bombing of our information landscape with bullshit. So at this moment, it certainly appears that Biden won the 2020 election far more decisively than Trump won in 2016. And Trump claimed massive voter fraud in that election too, right? The election he won to become president. He even claimed that Ted Cruz was guilty of voter fraud in the Iowa caucus. This is what he does, and it's part of the authoritarian playbook. Trump is a con man who has no respect for anything beyond himself, and he certainly has no concern for the health of our democracy. These are facts about his mind that he confirms for us on a daily basis. Obviously, any credible accusation of voter fraud should be looked at by the courts, but it's very important to point out that no one has been denying this basic principle of election fairness. But this was not like Bush versus Gore in 2000, which came down to 500 votes in a single state. Here we are talking about tens of thousands of votes in several states, a bigger margin than Trump won by in 2016, to which Hillary Clinton quickly conceded right, even though she won the popular vote. And President Obama immediately began cooperating with the transition team while Trump is still refusing to cooperate with Biden's two weeks into this process. And more importantly, so are the leaders in the Republican Party. That's how perverse this has gotten. Right now, Biden should be getting a daily security briefing, and his team should be speaking with foreign leaders on secure lines facilitated by the State Department. They should be able to speak with officials in every branch of our own government so they can get up to speed. Normally, all this would be going on while the election gets certified in the coming weeks. And normally the transition team would be given funds and access to government buildings at this point. And yet all of these resources are being denied to them. The real problem is that all of this controversy is being manufactured by bad faith actors. You can be confident that no one on Trump's team thinks he lost due to election fraud. Rather, they're attempting to delegitimize our democracy by pretending to think there was massive election fraud. It's like a soccer player who takes a dive and begins writhing around on the ground, right, hoping to deceive the ref and to win a penalty kick and possibly win the game. That way, no matter how good he makes it look, the soccer player knows he wasn't fouled. This is cheating. Trump and his enablers are hoping to hold on to the presidency by pretending they were fouled. And they're looking for a referee, whether a court or a state legislature, who just might award them a winning penalty kick. Short of that, they're trying to motivate the base in Georgia so they can hold on to the two Senate seats that will be decided in a runoff election in January. And beyond that, Trump and his family are clearly trying to monetize their cult so they can do who knows what to further debase American society after Trump leaves office. Again, let me be clear. I believe that everything I'm saying about Trump's attempt to undermine our democracy is as objective and uncontroversial and nonpartisan as saying something like, trump doesn't want to release his tax returns. I mean, how can I say that Trump doesn't want to release his tax returns? What am I, a mind reader? He's even said on a few occasions that he wants to release his tax returns. It's just that they're under audit, you see? Why not take the man at his word? Well, if you are that confused about who this man is, then there really is nothing I or anyone else can say to persuade you on these points. So let me just bracket what will otherwise be totally unacceptable to you by saying that my adamant on these points is coming from a very clear sense that what I'm saying is not just my opinion about Donald Trump. I believe I'm making factual statements about what he has done and why he has done it. The man really doesn't want to release his tax returns for whatever reason. I don't have to be a clairvoyant to know that it's the only rational interpretation of his actions. And he really did try to steal the presidency two weeks ago, and he appears to still be trying, however hopeless that might be. Think about this chain of events. We have a President who for months railed about how unreliable our election system was and about how mail in ballots in particular were guaranteed to produce massive fraud. And he made these claims entirely without evidence while being someone who votes by mail himself in Florida. And he said over and over again that we need a result on election night, knowing that the vote count always continues over subsequent days and that in this election, the later votes would disproportionately be weighted toward biden literally for months. Trump stigmatized mail imbalance in a calculated effort to get his supporters to vote in person, knowing that in person returns are generally counted first on election night. In fact, Republican lawmakers seem to have collaborated in this scheme by not allowing mail in ballots to be counted early in several key states. And in fact, the Republicans tried to starve the post office of funding over the summer, and Trump admitted that this was to keep them from being able to handle a surge in mail imbalance. And all of this occurred during the COVID pandemic, during which, for nearly nine months, trump downplayed the risk of the disease even as a quarter of a million people died from it. So he knew that concern about the coronavirus was also heavily biased along political lines because he had worked hard to bias it himself. And this caused in person voting to be even more heavily weighted toward his supporters. It sounds totally fantastical, but all of this happened in plain sight. Trump tried to engineer an episode of reality television that could have ushered in the end of our democracy. He was obviously hoping to step before the cameras in the wee hours of Wednesday morning with a significant lead in the polls, and to then demand that the vote counting stop. He was stage managing an attempted theft of the election, all the while encouraging his supporters to believe that the election was being stolen from him as the counting of ballots continued. And he did this all in a context in which he, as the sitting President of the United States, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost. So it's really hard to exaggerate how far from normal we had drifted when Trump stepped in front of the microphone on election night. We had a President of the United States declaring that he had won reelection by a large margin when there were millions of votes still being counted. And every reason to believe that most of those votes would be for his opponent. And the most prominent members of the Republican Party supported him in this. That is what has become of our politics. So in my view, this was a terrifying lurch toward authoritarianism, even if in many ways Trump is a fake authoritarian. And it could have worked. We could have lost our democracy two weeks ago. But the problem is, nearly half of our society doesn't know that. In fact, nearly half of our society is being told right now that we have lost our democracy because the election of Joe Biden was a fraud. This is a dangerous loss of social cohesion and it has been engineered by Trump and the Republican Party. I mean, imagine you're on a plane at 30,000ft and the pilot comes over the PA system and says, I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but we've heard credible reports that there's a bomb somewhere on the aircraft. Some people are saying it's in the luggage. Some people are saying it might have been smuggled on board by food service and it might have been placed in an overhead compartment by one of your fellow passengers. But just sit tight. We're going to get to the bottom of this. Imagine the panic that would cause. And now imagine what you would think of the pilot if you knew that he was lying. Imagine the mind of a pilot who has assumed so much control over the lives of his passengers who would tell a lie like that? What sort of person would do that? That's the president. Right now, the situation is almost certainly worse. In fact, the Trump campaign is aggressively fundraising on the back of their fake allegations of election fraud. The fundraising is ostensibly for all their legal actions, but most of the money will be used for other purposes to pay down their campaign debt and to form a Trump political action committee. Trump's even threatening to run for President again in 2024. So the President is like a pilot who's just announced that there's a bomb on the airplane. But if you just get out your credit card and donate generously to the Trump Bomb squad fund, he might be able to land the plane safely. But it's a fake crisis and he's just stealing money from millions of frightened and angry people and creating more division in our society in the process and actually increasing the likelihood that the plane we're all on at this moment will crash. And this is why it is appropriate to be outraged over this behavior. Trump and the people closest to him know exactly what they're attempting to do to our democracy. They understand that amplifying conspiracy theories increases the risk of serious violence and social disorder. And they absolutely know that they're putting our country at needless risk by not giving the Biden team the resources they need for a smooth transition. And this is not at all analogous to what's happening on the left. Yes, it also sows division in our society to call half the country racist. But the people who are doing that really are confused, right? They think half the country is racist. And I'm sure the confusion extends all the way up to the top. Right? Someone like AOC thinks half the country is racist. But Trump and his team know that they lost the election. They know why they're doing what they're doing. They know they are trying to eke out some personal advantage at massive social cost. That's what's so reprehensible. Obviously, I don't know what's going to happen next. I am reasonably confident that the tide has turned here and that our institutions are strong enough. And when push comes to shove, the military and law enforcement are professional and apolitical enough that Trump can be dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House in January if need be. But honestly, I think this pressure test of our institutions nearly failed. And that's scary. A few days after the election, on November 6, the journalist Jim Shudo tweeted, a new restricted national defense airspace has been put in place over presidential candidate Joe Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware. And then Samantha Power, who was our UN. Ambassador under President Obama. She also happens to be married to Cass Sunstein, who is a constitutional law scholar who's been on this podcast. Samantha forwarded this tweet with the comment, it's real. Our institutions will hold. Now, I practically burst into tears when I read that. Tweet and here's why. The fact that that was ever in doubt, that our institutions would hold the fact that there was even a question as to how the military would respond if we had a madman in the White House refusing to admit that he had lost an election and demanding that we stop counting votes in states where he was ahead and continue counting them in states where he was behind. The fact that I can even understand samantha's tweet. It's real. Our institutions will hold. The fact that I can parse the fucking sentence is evidence of a crime that has been committed against all of us and everyone who's been accusing Trump's. Critics of having Trumped derangement syndrome has been party to this crime. You really have played a game of chicken with our democracy, and in my view, you actually do have a lot to apologize for. This is not partisanship. This has never been a difference of opinion. We can have those. But you have protected a man who was manifestly unfit to be president, and that has been obvious since day one and long before day one. Yes, as I said, there is corruption and confusion and bad incentives and ordinary human frailty on both sides of our politics. And yes, we have a crisis of legitimacy in our society that is bigger than Trump, but Trump is the most malicious exploiter of it, and you cannot let your gaze wander from the core truth of this moment. We have a sitting us. President who is trying to hold on to power by shattering every democratic norm we have. And failing that, he is trying to sabotage the presidency of his successor for his own personal gain, and he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. This is probably the lowest point in our democracy since the Civil War. Now, of course, there is a silver lining to this. If the worst doesn't happen, if Trump's attempt to delegitimize the election fails, and it now seems virtually certain that it will, and if we don't see some crazy degree of violence or political assassinations sparked by his conspiracy theories, we have discovered that much of what keeps our democracy intact is not a matter of our laws, but of our political norms. So many safeguards against corruption and abuses of power and a creep toward authoritarianism depend on the decency of the people in power. And what Trump has taught us, beyond any possibility of doubt, is that we can't rely on human decency. We need a system that can handle a psychopath. In the White House, however, it seems clear that most Trump voters really don't understand what's happening. And I know that sounds patronizing, but it's not meant to be. I mean, there are reports of people in ICUs right now dying from COVID who still think COVID is a hoax. That's how crazy our information landscape has become, and Trump has worked tirelessly to make it that crazy. Remember, Trump launched his political career with the birther conspiracy. And when he came to office in 2016, about a third of Americans believed the birther conspiracy, and 72% of Republicans believed it. Let that sink in. During the 2016 campaign, 72% of registered Republicans believed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore that his presidency was illegal and illegitimate. And things have only gotten worse. Trump is President of the United States. He has tweeted QAnon articles suggesting that Obama and Biden had members of Seal Team Six murdered to conceal the fact that they never actually killed Osama bin Laden. The President of the United States. Tweeted that? Now, if you don't think that's a catastrophe for our country and for the world to have promoted such a person to the highest position of power, I'm afraid that's on you. Caring about this sort of thing isn't Trump derangement syndrome. If you don't care about a US. President who lies as freely as he breathes, who makes a laughingstock out of our country with nearly every utterance that's on you, these things actually matter, whether they matter to you or not. So who do we hold accountable for what has happened here and for what has almost happened and for what may yet happen? I do think we need to give something like 70 million people a mulligan here and then make a serious effort to solve the social problems that cause so many of them to support Trump. No doubt this is a conversation that will absorb many future episodes of this podcast, but we run a serious risk of moral hazard if there are no consequences for the people who decided to torch our democracy on the chance that they might personally gain from it. Imagine that a man attempts to rob a bank, but it doesn't work out. Let's say that after he's pulled out his gun and started screaming for everyone to get down on the floor, and perhaps after he's pistol whipped the guard, something goes wrong and it becomes clear that he won't be able to rob the bank after all, what's the point of no return reputationally? What's the last moment where you get to say, sorry, this isn't really a bank robbery, I'm not actually a bank robber. Everyone can get up off the floor now. We're just going to have to agree to disagree about what happened here. I do think a line has been crossed here. Again, not necessarily with respect to our laws, but with respect to norms that are even more important than many of our laws. Is it illegal for a sitting president to not commit to a peaceful transfer of power? Is it illegal for him to pretend to think that there was massive election fraud and to claim to have won an election that he really lost? Is it illegal for him to spread socially toxic lies every hour on social media? It doesn't seem so, but that's not the point. Trump has still managed to do tremendous harm to our society, and he seems committed to doing further harm. So at a minimum, I believe the right way to treat Trump and his crime family after January 20 is the way we treated OJ. Simpson after he was acquitted of a double murder that everyone knew he had actually committed. We should just let them fall into oblivion. Of course, I'm under no illusions that will actually happen, but it should happen. We should all do our best to withdraw our attention from this man who has gotten more attention in the last four years than any person in human history. And for those of you who still think that not acknowledging how bad Trump is is the only way to resist the craziness coming from the left, all I can say is that it seems quite clear that you're wrong. Trump was never an answer to the problem of the far left. In fact, the left has drawn a massive amount of energy and seeming credibility from him. It's true that the problem of illiberalism on the left has been growing for a long time, but it has gotten as bad as it has under Trump. And Trump has been bringing gasoline to that fire again because it has always served his personal interests to do so. What we need is real moderation and pragmatism and professionalism in our politics now. And while I was never very enthusiastic about Biden and Harris, there is a big difference between both of them and AOC. And again, if you want a real parallel for the dangerous insanity that's been encouraged by Trump, you have to go further left than AOC. Trump is president. QAnon right now, the most destructive thing about the Trump presidency has been the orgy of lying and misinformation that has subsumed everything in our public conversation. The utter devaluation of truth has been the worst part, because it affects everything else. Anyway, the next two months should be very interesting. I certainly expect there will be a transition to a biden presidency, but who knows, really? It still feels like something bad can happen here. But even after a smooth transition, there will still be a lot of hard work to do to steer our culture toward basic sanity on real issues the pandemic, the economic effects of lockdown, wealth inequality, more generally, social cohesion. Collisions with foreign adversaries like China and Russia, cybersecurity, climate change. The list of challenges is quite long and daunting, and it seems clear that only a fact based discussion will help us meet them. And with that, I will leave you. As always, thanks for listening./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private SS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for having me again. So I'll give that dog a moment. You sent someone over to kill my dog? I'll sacrifice a lot for a podcast, but probably not your dog. Okay, good. Thank you, Caitlin. So now people have read the article that was embargoed last time around that we couldn't talk about. We should start there first. I should say you and I have already spoken about your health before. We obviously had before the last podcast, so we'll talk about it here as well. But I can't feign surprise at the ordeal you've been going through. But let's take the article part first because people obviously should just go read it. It's this really just wonderfully luminous and wise and witty. This is sort of not a surprise with you ever, but it all came together on this topic, which is revealing both your current health concerns and the way in which they're compounded by the COVID pandemic. And it was just all interesting and beautiful and triggered an outpouring of appreciation on Twitter, which, again, was totally unsurprising given who you are and how many people I know love you, because having done now a few podcasts with you, it's just absolutely obvious the degree to which you inspire love in an audience. And this may not be something that was obvious to you, but it was very obvious to me because I've been on the receiving end of it. So I guess my first question is, was there anything about the reception on Twitter and anywhere else you saw it that surprised you? The the bigger feeling was embarrassment, you know, because it's really intimate to open up your health issue. I mean, some people are really comfortable with it, and for me, it's not something, obviously, that I talk about. So it was the first wave of it was I just felt embarrassed to have laid all this laid this heavy trip on people or to feel that I was getting I don't know. I don't know. I just felt embarrassed. But then after about 24 hours, as always happens when you come out of whatever closet you're in, when the minute you come out of it, you're like, what's an incredible relief. Because I would be sort of tiptoeing around this many times in my work or in what was expected or hoped that I could do in terms of sort of making appearances, places. So it's always easier to just sit out there, just to have told the full any relevant truth. Once people know it, then you're not hiding it anymore. And it really gotten to the point that I felt like I was hiding my illness and that felt really bad. Well, let's summarize it for people who haven't read it. What is your diagnosis? And perhaps just track through the stages of its presentation. All right. I'll tell everybody. I bet they'll be super bored and just fast forward over this part of the podcast. But for anybody who's interested and I should say whatever we're going to say now is no substitute for reading your piece because thank you. I want that read. Please go. Thank you. Well, so I was a young mom in the sweet spot. I was 40, so not a young mom, but I had really young kids. I had twins who were four years old and behind my generation, I guess I was just one of these girls who really I didn't ever really want a career. I mean I thought about teaching school, which I did, and I thought about writing, which I do, but I really wanted to be a mom. I wanted to be a housewife. I didn't know the dark side of it, but I just thought having kids, which will be the best part of my life and then when they're little will be the super best part. Because my parents really hated having adolescent daughters and I kind of remembered how horrible that was for them. But it was no picnic for us either. So everything was fine. Never been sick, never thought of myself as sick, nobody that I knew in our family, we don't have a lot of family history, but nobody had had cancer, breast cancer. And I went for this like routine check up mammogram and then it was like well can you just wait a few minutes? We need to get another film. Oh, sure. You know, I'm not really my ears aren't like freaking up at this. And then, oh, he wants to have a sonogram. And two of my closest friends had to have a sonogram after their mammograms and been totally fine. So I thought, like I said, what happens when you're in your forty s you get the sonogram. And then right then and there he said, yeah, you have cancer. And and he said, and we're doing a biopsy now. And he never asked me if he could do a biopsy. Just the things that happen to you when you're really heavily medicalized. It's really hard to assert your will again or to even know because I remember lying there thinking, well do and I have a say in this? But I didn't say anything. And then he said like these needle biopsy a little bit painful. And then he kept saying, you have to prepare yourself. You have to prepare yourself. It was a Friday, so it would take, I don't know, until the next week, early to get the results of the biopsy. I guess it was Monday. And he kept saying he didn't want me to drive. I got in dress. He wanted me to see him. We wanted to meet to see him in his office, at which point he told me it was aggressive, very aggressive. And then he said, I don't want you to drive and I should call your husband. And I just had this animal need to get as far away from him as I could and to contain the information as much as I could. I just thought, something weird has happened in this building. I got to get out of here. I got to not have anybody know about it. And so I'm sure I shouldn't have driven. I'm sure I was in shock. And then my husband called. So the guy had called my husband, and I'm not blaming the guy at all. It's just sort of interesting that you start losing your I don't know, it's very easy to lose your sense of who you really are in this. But I'm sure the guy was right to call my husband, but I got home safely. Before we proceed. That does strike me as an anachronism. That does seem like a throwback to the 50s, where doctors sort of messaged around the woman to the man and in some cases didn't even tell the woman their actual diagnosis. This seems like a slightly Mad Men era doc you were seeing. Does it strike you that way in retrospect now, at the time? You're thinking of so many things. That's the last thing I remember, really, like, oh, God damn it, because my husband called on the cell phone and saying he knew. I just heard from so and so, but I think the doctor whom I had really gotten to know, he'd help me with another problem earlier. I think he was freaked out, and I just think there was a lot of very human emotions going back and forth between him and me, and I blame him. 0% for either of those acts. It just was part of the introduction to me of what it's like to have cancer, what it's like to have a really serious disease where, like, suddenly you think you've seen things. I've had a cesarean section. I've been up against it. You haven't been up against it until you get that really serious disease and you're in a whole other world. And so I had turned on stage three and I got slammed with just this kind of chemo. I don't think they give it anymore. They've written books about it's called The Red Devil. I can't remember what it's taxateer. Maybe it's just a horrible, horrible, horrible experience to go through that kind of chemo, but I had the chemotherapy, I had the surgery, the lumpectomy, I had the radiation by a very charming doctor who I later heard was kind of in the early stages of dementia, but I totally dug him, so he got along great. He was always telling me how beautiful I was, and I was like, this is the best doctor I've ever seen. Like, I'm bald, I'm shriveled, I'm like, is that the first sign of dementia accomplishment? I think so. I think so. I should have run for the hills. But anyways, I had a good remission, and I was just at that five year point that kind of hyped up as a significant point, and I had a huge, devastating recurrence where it was in my liver and my chest wall in my lungs, and I thought, oh, my God, I'm really going to die. I'm going to leave these kids, you know? And how old are your kids at that point? They are just about ten. And so on the one hand, I was like, okay, I got him through to double digits area, you know? But a kid really needs and wants his mom, especially a boy, I think 13, 1415. Up until then, they have a very deep need for a mom because they're so behind developmentally. Girls at that point, obviously, girls and mothers, et cetera. But I've noticed that boys have a deep need for mom until kind of that age. I was like, I wish I had gotten them there. Give me a little more about your life at that point now, are you still married to your boy's father? Yes. Okay. I don't actually know the backstory. You guys are still married? Oh, my gosh, yes. He's the cancer husband of the year. That's one of the things about everyone's had a crisis and everybody's had a tragedy, and that's where you really find out what people are made of, you know? Yeah. Okay, well, I'm very happy about that. Yes. As is everyone listening? Yes. Were you at this point working full time as a writer? Are you at Harvard Westlake School as a college counselor? No. By then, I had quit the school to become a mother. Took me a year and a half to get pregnant. I had the children. And what was it? What was I doing? Well, I had just started writing. I was just writing these articles at The Atlantic. I just started as a writer, and they'd given me this chance to write, and they'd liked what I'd written, so I'd written more and more. And then I had written one that caused this huge sensation, and I had been given this huge book deal. And I literally am getting the deal at the same week that I'm finding out. Like, I'm so sick. This is back at the original diagnosis. So anyways, I got better. I published the book. There was a lot of press, a lot of negative press. But then a lot of people who really liked the book, but of course I ignored them entirely as fools and really trusted everybody who hated more dementia. Yes, exactly. So I had done that and I had a contract for the next book and I felt a lot of pressure about that. But yeah, I was out there in the culture, I was doing my thing that I do and getting more and more confident in it. And then it hit me again and it was so bad because you hear like in your lungs, you see every bad. You were a bit younger than I am, but we're kind of in the same range there where we grew up with these, like, really horrible, like, TV movies of the week. And it would always be like, gosh, my elbow hurts, you've got elbow cancer. And then like, the whole rest of the TV movie is the person, like, losing their hair and dying. So I thought, this is so bad. And then a nurse in the private practice. I knew so little about cancer when we started all this that we asked people for names of practices and it was a private practice. Cedar Sinai, excellent practice, excellent doctor. I love him to this day. So I thought, oh, a private practice, that's got to be better than a public hospital or a teaching hospital. Obviously, if you pay for more for something or for your insurance, that's really the hero of this whole thing is I haven't have great insurance or my husband's job. But it turns out that you don't always have access to everything that you could possibly have access to. If you're kind of down the line in a private practice, they're kind of getting the first crack at medications that are being put out there, but they're not getting it the way the labs are. And when you're stage four, nobody's going to question what they offer you. So a wonderful nurse took me aside at that private practice and risked his job by closing the door and saying, I think you should get a second opinion. Because I had really trusted him and I asked him, what should I do? And he said, I think you should get a second opinion. And that was profound. Maybe we should define stage four for people who haven't been through this on any level. So you originally had breast cancer, but now it has metastasized to your lungs and liver and elsewhere. And so stage four is just the fact of having metastasized elsewhere in the body from the primary site in most cancers. I think that's the way the staging works. It's certainly the way the staging works in breast cancer. Stage four in most cancers and in breast cancer just means it jumped the fire break that you had it contained within just one within the breast or whatever the primary form of cancer was, and maybe it's even in. The lymph node, which was, in my case, true when I first got it, so that you can really get warmth with the chemo and all that, to try to kill it from ever getting into the blood at all. Although it's in a little bit, starting to get a little bit, but when it breaks the fire, you know, jumps the fire break, as I say, that's when that cancer has wildly gone through the system and is attacking and finding locations to build itself in different parts of the body. And that's really serious. And in my mind I'd always thought, and it used to be kind of a pretty soon death sentence, but someone else I know in Los Angeles, and if she's listening, she'll smile because she'll know who she is, who knows a lot about cancer. She just looked at me and said, you have to get closer to the science. You have a particular kind of breast cancer. It is marked by the overexpression of a certain kind of genetic material. All of that work is doing being done at UCLA. And I know you have to wait longer to be seen, and it's a hassle, but that's where you need to go. Because this guy, Dennis Slayman, you have her two new breast cancer, and he's the guy who's really hacked into that with this new drug, Herceptin, and then with a hall armamentarium that followed that. So I got an appointment with one of these brilliant young oncologists in his lab, Sarah Hervitz, and my last practice that said, well, we're going to section your liver and take out the part of your liver with the cancer in it. I was like, oh, that sounds really bad. She was like, not at all. She had so many treatments. She said, I think this one will be the best. We'll give you six treatments. Six, it's chemotherapy plus the herceptin, plus some other things that were from their armamentorium. And after three treatments, we'll give you a scan and see how it's going. And, you know, you go for the scan after three treatments, that's terrifying. But the really terrifying part is going to find the result, you know, getting the answer. And we had actually, we booked a night, actually, because her office is in Santa Monica and we're far east of there. And we just said, okay, we're going to book a night in a nice hotel. Because if it's bad news, we'll need time to pull ourselves together before we see the kids. And if it's good news, we'll have a nice night in a nice hotel. So she walks in and said, your tumors are gone. Like, there's, there's still traces in the blood. We have to finish this. But they were gone, and they stayed gone for eleven years of durable remission. Eleven years. And you just think, I mean, if it had been five years earlier, the thought that a woman with metastatic breast cancer with lesions big enough to be biopsied in the or. Would be like, not have a single one of them. After three treatments of chemotherapy, that was much easier than my first chemotherapy. And I was tiptoeing into there's a cohort, a very small cohort of women in Dennis Slayman's sort of research and work, who doctors are starting to tiptoe around calling them cured, which stage four cancer, there's no cure, et cetera, et cetera. We're never going to use that word, but they have gone so long with no remission of any kind or no recurrence rather of any kind, that they're starting to wonder if they're actually cured of breast cancer. And I thought I was going to be in that group, and then my tumor numbers started going up, and sure enough, eventually a scan came about a year and a half ago, or almost two years ago, a year and a half ago, that I'm once again metastatic. So it's not good news to find out you have metastatic cancer, obviously. And it was in my spine that was really scary to me because I could just sort of see, not being a person who did well in biology but was interested in biology, I could sort of see a tumor in a soft tissue kind of disappearing. It was harder for me to think of a tumor and bone disappearing, but yeah, they do. The lesion goes, and then the bone starts to heal. Even in someone who's like, what am I, 58? And I've got all this treatment. So my biggest issues really are I have from all of this treatment over all these years. I have a lot of health issues that come from the treatment, not from the cancer. And it's mostly these issues that now I've been taught before they were just my conditions, I guess, but now they're my underlying conditions. It's really bad. If your worst condition becomes an underlying condition, then it's like someone just layered on another even worse condition. So just telling the public, to the extent that I have a public or any public of people who don't haven't read me at all, that I have stage four cancer. In a shortish essay was going to take a lot of unpacking. Anyway, to explain that this tall subcategory that I have been in and maybe still am in that's very good news relative to bad news. And then trying to layer the COVID on over it. It was just very it was like an exposure dream in a way, even though it's been a relief. Had you spoken about it or written about it at all? Because I had sort of missed it, but I got the sense that you hadn't been completely in the closet with respect to having gone through the initial round of cancer. Well, in my first book, in the very epilogue, because I wrote it after I'd had this first bout of cancer, but was now back on my feet, I wrote about, oh, I had one other thing to tell you. I had cancer. And this is what it was like. It was just a few pages. And then a few years after that, the Oprah magazine asked me to write something about it, and I foolishly agreed. And something came out that was kind of I don't know, I didn't do a good job with that. And then I thought, never again will I write about cancer. And then I what was the painful response to that? It wasn't the response. It was my feeling that I hadn't done a good job in the essay, that I hadn't like what I'd done. But the Oprah reading public is not a big overlap with the people who often read my I don't know. The thing is that it's true that this is a very deathy situation, and so people who have no idea that you've been in a deathy situation obviously respond thinking you're dying, which of course I am, as we all are. But then that kind of makes you look anew at your situation like, oh my God, this is a really shocking, terrible situation. And then trying to resettle yourself, especially in a pandemic where you can't go and see the people, you can talk to them. But I guess whenever someone hears about it from the outside of me and my family or people who really know us, the reaction of the people tell me, yeah, I've been through a lot in 17 years. But when you're living your life, that's not ever how it feels. It's just you live your life with whatever hand of cards you have. Yeah. Well, there's a lot in there that's interesting. First, I want to flag that a deathy situation is the phrase I'm going to use now. Okay, it's yours. Take it. It's yours. That's one of the windfall profits of this episode of the podcast. Okay, good. It is interesting the way in which talking about something realize it just based on the response. You get to having spoken about it, and then you're dealing with the response, and often that feels like it concretizes a problem in a way that's not entirely representative of the experience of going through the problem. Right. I guess in microcosm I've experienced this where this is highly non analogous. But I don't know if you have a fight with your spouse, and then a friend catches you right on the heels of that, and they ask how you're doing, then you say you just had a, you know, a fight with your spouse, you know. Then the next time they talk to you, they're asking you, how it's going? You know, in the marriage, I found a good lawyer yet. Right. You're like, what are you talking about? Yeah, like, who's going to keep the kids? Right? But that has no relation to what you've actually gone through. Right. And so I can imagine there can be a kind of amplification that happens when now you're dealing with this huge public response. The other thing that's unique about cancer it seems is just the word, the concept of this particular illness being unlike any other. And this is still true, but I'm sure it was even more true 17 years ago. It's a scary word and it is the quintessence of a deathly situation. How has the concept of having cancer influenced the experience of having it? In the beginning, I remember thinking that first weekend because I had the appointments Friday afternoon and I remember the first weekend just thinking I can't incorporate this information. I just felt like it was outside of me and I had to somehow get it into me that it's just the cliche that this is something other people get. We really Freud. We live by convincing ourselves we're invulnerable when we're very vulnerable. Somebody's got to get breast cancer. I couldn't take it in. I just could not take it in. And it does seem different from getting a diagnosis of heart disease or emphysema or I mean there are obviously bad things to get that kill people but don't have this same charge. Do you think it's the result of the difference or the very common difference in treatment around cancer where chemotherapy and radiation are what you're now picturing and in many cases actually going to experience? And so this is the one disease you go to war with in a way that you don't with, say, heart disease. Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it for sure. And I think that it is again so deathy. And that most of the I always felt and I used to say beforehand, just kind of looking at you always look at obituaries and you read them and I remember thinking, yeah, the three things I noticed over and over are smoking, car accidents and cancer. It was not a scientific study, but I noticed that the things that I tended to be like whenever I would be about to take off an airplane if I felt frightened at all and say, it's not smoke, you're not smoking, you're not this and you're not that. Numbers are on your side, and it's just the war on cancer. Remember Nixon had that and it was just that all of these other diseases were sort of falling by the wayside. And my mother told me my sister's older than I am, so she was a baby in the 1950s. And my mother said sitting with the baby in her lap in New York to go and get one of the first kids to be in the cohorts that got the polio vaccine, my mother said she just thought, my baby's never going to have polio. My child. It was like such a joyous. Amazing. She couldn't wrap her mind around it. Because if you had been born in the knew a lot of people with kids who had gotten polio and a lot of parents whose lives had been just completely taken to a terrible place because their kids getting polio and so like all these other diseases seem to be falling by the wayside. And yet cancer has stayed with us for so long, and we know that it's the one that and I've always been adamant that I'll not be in this situation, that you could be treated in such a way that made your life even worse for three months and then you die right after that. You know that. So it's kind of like this thing that can potentially the treatment can be so horrible and it might not work. So it's really kind of a heavy thing to think about. Yeah. Although no bravery. I can't tell you how many times I've been told in the last 72 hours, thank you to anybody who said that to me, and many times in my private life how brave I am. Zero bravery. Zero, zero bravery. Someone comes to you and they say, hey, got a choice here. You have a life threatening disease. It can kill you in a few months, or we could try out this treatment. I'm like, I'll take the treatment. Let's give it door number two. I'll take door number two. Maybe it's a Zonk, but maybe I'll get there. So a lot of things I've learned about cancer, like, number one, how you feel. Total myth. If you have a good attitude, you're going to do better. It's a lot of studies on that. You could be a total bitch. You can be upset, you can cry every day. You take the medicine, you take the chemotherapy. Sometimes it works for you. Sometimes it fails you and you have to try another one. You don't have to have a good attitude. You don't have to be right with God. It's nice to be nice to all your caregivers, and you will be because they are so great. But you don't have to be nice to anybody. It's just the chemicals go in. There's a response. I think probably there's probably more compliance with treatment in people who have a good attitude. I've never had a good attitude ever in my life. And look at me at 17 years later. Wait a minute. Are you in the total bitch cohort of this study? Well, there have just been I remember asking somebody who knew about this very early on who studies this, and I said, I just feel like I have to be so good because I'm in such a precarious situation. She said, oh, no, Caitlin, I have seen the nicest people, and you probably know many very good people who died of cancer. And I'm like, well, that's really true. And then she said, trying to cheer me up, and I've known some real bitches who made it. And I'm like, okay, somewhere between total bitch and really nice person, but maybe more to the former that it's irrelevant. It's just irrelevant. What obviously we know. This children get cancer. Who's punishing them for that? What have they done? Nothing. It's beyond our knowledge. It's not beyond our knowledge. It responds well. Some cancers respond well to certain kind of chemotherapies. One of the aspects of your essay, which I know touched a lot of people, is the way in which you discuss reaching these various landmarks by reference to your sons, their graduation from preschool and elementary school and reserving a hotel suite for their college graduation, which now is indefinitely postponed due to COVID And just seeing the psychological suffering based on uncertainty, which, again, if we have our wits about us, should be experiencing in some measure, without a cancer diagnosis, we're all in a deathly situation, as you point out. We're not no one knows how long they're going to live, and therefore we could be magnifying the preciousness of time in this way anyway. And I think a fair amount of wisdom is dependent on taking death seriously before you've had any kind of diagnosis. But in your case, in the case of anyone who gets cancer, it sharpens up the story considerably. And I know I know that moved me and I'm sure it moved a lot of people. How has just thinking in terms of being a mom and seeing various hypothetical dates out there on the calendar, being the way in which this whole experience has been framed for you? Well, very helpful, because it was just I've got a mission, and it's not a mission about my life, it's a mission about my children's lives. And to the extent children can have their mother, they want their mother. So I just I will account in my life in two ways by it just so happened that they were in preschool when I was diagnosed and there was nowadays there are all these constantly graduations but there was this sweet little preschool graduation. And everybody was just so happy and bustling and taking their pictures. And I had no hair. I was in a head scarf. And I just remember thinking, this is going to be the only graduation you're going to get. Kindergarten rolls around, well, they got a graduation and I'm still alive, and I made it a few more years and I thought, I'm going to make it to elementary school graduation. And then I had my recurrence and I thought, oh, I'm not going to get there. But I did. Well, I made it to elementary. The years pass. I'm like, I think I've got high school in the back. Yes, I got it to high school, and then I really thought I had made it to college. And then I got this recurrence halfway through there being in college. But I got treatment. I did. Well, I sat on the phone to make the very first reservation allowable for the graduation of this year at Kenyan wonderful Kenyan College in Ohio at the Mount Vernon Grand. And then now, because of COVID it's been canceled. So, like, in the movie version of this I have to keep it getting canceled forever so that I can stay alive because the graduation will be the end point. That's your appointment in Samara. Exactly. My appointment in Gambier. Exactly. But what you ask about death? Two things and how we hold life preciously. I remember, like, 25 years ago. Do you remember when there was an Alaska airline flight that crashed maybe off the coast of Santa Barbara? It was a big crash full of people from La. So it was very meaningful, touched a lot of people. And the weekend edition of the La. Times after that, they had a one pager where they went and asked different religious leaders what meaning do you make of this? What meaning are your followers or does your faith hold for this event? And, you know, some people said there's, you know, predetermination or there's mystery or life is you know, God has plans that we don't see. But the last one was a Buddhist and the Buddhist said the cause of death is birth. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's really accurate. There's one thing we can say for sure that once you're born, at some point you're getting out of here. You're checking out. It's temporary. But the other thing about how we should be holding our lives in such a tender, close way all the time I think that's kind of the lesson of the play. Our Town by Thornton Wilder is that you can't it's kind of a corny play, but it's about a girl who kind of comes back to life and realizes how preciously she should be holding and everyone in the room should be holding each moment. But you just can't do it, even after you've gotten the word about it. If we lived life with the intensity of somebody who's looking at their kids after getting cancer diagnosis we wouldn't be able to do anything. And to some extent, we're in such a precarious situation at all times that the only way to deal with how precarious it is is to almost pretend it's not precarious. I think there's one strand of that kind of wisdom in extremists that we can seize and maintain at its highest level. And I'll grant you that we can't say goodbye to everyone. Like, we're mounting the scaffolds every time someone's just leaving to run an errand. So there's an intensity to our awareness of our connectedness to other people that we can't quite maintain. But I think we can resolve to not suffer over trivial things the way it would be obvious. We shouldn't be suffering over those things under the shadow of a cancer diagnosis. Right. Although maybe someone is kind of a jerk to you and you have cancer. You don't have to necessarily think to yourself I must see the humanity in this person. Because it's like, I think you get to still know. You still get to have I mean, it's very refreshing. Let me tell you, when you're in a deathy situation, the minute some small trivial thing bothers you, you're like, what a wonderful sensation to just be, like, annoyed by something. God, it's excellent. Okay, well, speaking of that, I wasn't sure I was going to bring this up, but you did have one response on Twitter that was just amazing. I mean, amazing to it. Wasn't it great? Wasn't it the best thing ever? All Twitter kind it was glorious, but it was so perfectly crafted that it was one of those moments where you think, okay, this is a simulation we're living in, and it's showing, it seems, because this is just too on the nose. So you receive a tweet which has since been deleted, I think. Oh, has it? Yeah, which I guess maybe shows some scruple. No, it shows anxiety. Shows anxiety. If it had been a lauded tweet, it would be the pinned tweet. Yeah. It wasn't based on any scruple. I'm sure you're right about that, but I'm going to bend over backwards to be charitable to this person. All right. And you don't even have a deathly situation. Actually, I was charitable to this person, but carry on. You were actually you were perfect in your response. No, I was even more perfect in my response, but I'll tell you, at the end, it was private communication. Oh, good. So, yeah, I want to hear everything. So anyway, this woman, Dr. Amita Kalishandran, who is a doctor, and I was surprised and doubly horrified to learn a New York Times writer tweeted at you in response to your cancer article in The Atlantic. Yes, but open your eyes to the other Karen's in the room. You're going to have to explain what Karens are to people. Yes, but open your eyes to the other Karen's in the room. Like Caitlin Pacific. That's your Twitter handle. Her piece was slightly less overt and was likely edited down for tone. I read Caitlin's cancer story and sincerely hope she uses these last years of her life to learn to be a little bit less racist and anti feminist. Okay, isn't that the best thing ever? I mean, I'm not saying it in, like, a badass way. It's just if we just needed any evidence that I'm sure if she met me, she wouldn't have said that, but that Twitter is just this kind of this place where you float all these trial balloons and they're kind of meaningless. They're just absolutely meaningless. And even as I saw it, I thought I knew there'd be a ghoulish response from somebody because you're always hearing about, you know, how in the murders in the elementary school in Connecticut, sandy Hook, and there's this whole branch of thinking that they were not killed and it was a simulation. And parents can't even go to their children's graves, which was even the phrase children's graves is so obscene. So you know that it's a big country with a lot of people, but I didn't think it would be somebody who is a physician. It writes for The New York Times occasionally. And the Big Path. The other really horrible discovery was that she wrote her first thing on her own Twitter site was, here's my first article for The Atlantic. Yeah, but two weeks ago, she wrote for The Atlantic, and I was like and then also mindfulness. Mindfulness is one of her main passions, which was fantastic for my brain. I felt like the only thing I was going to find, like, what else is she like? And she slept with your husband. It's like, what else has this woman done to me? So that it just became kind of drool. There was nothing but drollery to be had. Well, so I'm less interested in singling her out for abuse than in flagging. What was so interesting about seeing this tweet for me? First of all, my obviously, I feel very protective of you, and as did many people following you. So the response from Twitter collectively was just analogous to this will date me and you, perhaps, but do you remember the film Silkwood with Meryl Street? Yeah. Okay, you're telling me that that's not a current movie? Half of our audience will have never heard of this on any level, but there's a scene where she's leaving the reactor and sets off the the radiation alarm, right? And everything goes into just emergency mode, and she gets a horrific shower with the bristle brushes. And it's like everyone following you on Twitter just had that reaction. It was just, oh, my God, this is the most toxic despicable hottake possible. And people were fairly modulated in how much they slammed her. But the one thing that could be said in her defense is she couldn't have been referring to your cancer article for having been edited down for tone. She must have been referring to some other piece that she thought, well, this is the thing. So I published a long piece about Meghan Markle about two months ago, and it was a very positive Meghan Markle. It was sort of saying explicitly, she's the best thing that ever happened to the royal family. It's a multicultural Britain, and that's an all white balcony up there and really talked about what she had been through and ultimately decided that the Queen of England is really an admirable person because she is someone who just, no matter what, has put her own desires last and what she perceives to be the country's desire first. And so at the time of that article, there was a perception that it was motivated by racial animus. And I was really interested, and I started to engage with people. I said, what is it that you find here that's racial animus? And they would say, you never said this. You never said this. You never said this. You said this. You said this. You said this. And I said, I did say all the things you thought I should say. I never said any of the things you thought I shouldn't have said. And then I started replying to the Twitters with the tweets about it with lines directly from the article itself so that they would see that I think that they just saw the article and that it was about Megan. And they're very protective of Meghan, which I certainly understood because when I was young, I was very protective of Princess Diana, whatever. But so that had been kind of what she was responding to, for sure, was this two month old Megan Markle piece. So Karen and a Becky I don't know what happened to Becky. I don't know if Karen killed Becky and now Karen is ascendant or if Becky and Karen are like cousins and kind of like Midge and Barbie, where there's some slight distinction. But these are middle aged white women who or maybe any age woman, maybe Karen is the middle aged woman and Becky is the younger sister. I don't know. But they're clueless white women whose casual expectation of privilege, which they wouldn't even think of as privilege in the world, comes at tremendous cost to other people, and in particular to African American women. And I think they have the people who believe in the Becky Karen continuum, I would say they're absolutely right about that. No argument. Have seen it many times. And I wrote 15 years ago, a long cover story was really the first story in a big national magazine that really said at length what we think of as a women's movement, as feminism, has been tremendous gains for wealthy white women. And not only has it been far fewer gains for women of color and poor women, but in fact, white women have leveraged rich white women, successful professional white women have leveraged their gains on the exploitation of darker skinned women. So I agree with them about a lot of that. But she was dead wrong about this essay. And then you would sort of think but not only wrong about the essays, she seemed to be suggesting that the transgressions were all the more conspicuous for their absence. Right. It had been likely edited down for so now we have to deal with the dog of racism that doesn't bark, right? It's incredible. And the thing that I think provokes such delight in people, certainly in me, is that this was a crystallization of the problem that we've been commenting on for now years, but the way in which the antecedent good intentions that get organized into wokeness become a kind of mental disorder, right? I mean, this is just such a bad take at this moment on you and your cancer story from a doctor. And again, the fact that she's a New York Times writer, she's written, I don't know, six or seven pieces for them, and that's enough to call her a New york Times writer for sure. It compounds the horror of this. I mean, honestly, if she were just a doctor, I'm not sure I would be inclined to even name her in our discussion here. But she has a journalistic responsibility not to be this clueless beyond the Hippocratic Oath of a doctor. You could imagine a doctor who just doesn't know how social media should work, but that's not the case here. Upon reading that, how much of your brain's real estate was given over to being offended or annoyed, and how much of it was just pure delight, I will be honest that in the moment, it was extremely painful. Yeah, it was. And I always remember this great routine NZ Ansari had where he said he scrolling through his tweets or whatever, and there was some young woman who said, I just love is he's Ansari? And he said, she just assumed that I would never find that tweet. And he's like, of course I found the tweet. That's all I do. I'm a comedian. I sit home looking at Twitter, and then I go to work at night. So it's sort of like a lot of times, people tweet things out, assuming that the other person won't see them or maybe won't react to them as a human being, in a sense. And it was such a shocking thing. It was so shocking. Well, the fact that she's the remaining years, it was a lie to say, I sincerely hope she spends her remaining years. So the idea is like, okay, she has decided that I am anti feminist and a racist, and I'm going to spend my few remaining years, which she's giving me a prognosis now and then when I am a perfect vehicle of cleanliness, I can die. There won't even be like that. I can bring this out to the world. It's just that I must prepare for death by cleansing myself of sins that she says I have but cannot prove that I have. Right. Which were all the more evident by their absence in your article because you had been so successfully edited. Right, yeah. I mean, the fact that she's a doctor. There's something truly vile about a doctor playing the prognosis card in some way. To dunk on you to make a social justice point that is obviously an error. The fact that this is what's so fucking vile about this. The fact that the social justice triumphalism could co opt the Hippocratic oath, the role of a doctor in talking responsibly about cancer, a cancer diagnosis, and all of the suffering and uncertainty and sheer chaos that is in that bag when you open it. That's what I think everyone found so despicable, and I think rightly, so she's deleted the tweet for reasons that are, I'm sure, self serving. It would be nice for her to actually apologize to you. Let's pivot to that. Because for me, it's interesting to consider how we repair our public conversation around moments like this, because it seems to me that there should be some apology adequate to this moment that you and anyone else could accept. Right. It's like, for me, this is something I've referred to in previous conversations as the physics of apology. I think it's an interesting question to consider what constitutes and what should constitute an adequate apology. So you do something wrong, you say something stupid, you reveal intentions that were despicable, and you think better of it, and you actually want to repair the situation. And so that really the only instrument available is an apology. The closest I can get to it is for an apology to be acceptable, it has to be clear what process you went through so that you're no longer the same person who committed the original transgression. So for her to successfully apologize to you, the apology, it would have to reveal that she stands in the same place, or at least a relevantly similar place to her original, in this case, tweet that you and everyone else who found it despicable do. She has to be able to look back on what she did with more or less the same horror that everyone found appropriate in the moment the tweet was seen, and to apologize from that place, and it has to be intelligible how a person had that epiphany. Otherwise people will think they're just faking it, they're just trying to get out of hot water. And it's not a sincere apology. So for an apology to be sincere, you have to be able to articulate or at least seemingly display a journey out from the place where you were the asshole who was so clueless as to say or do this wrong thing, and now you're the person who you're able to say, I can't believe I did that. That's just mortifying. I'm so sorry. I hope you accept my apology. It can only be credible if that journey is plausible. Well, I think a lot about apology. I've had to make a lot of apologies in my life because I screw up a lot. Maybe everybody screws up to some extent, but this is for me when I make an apology. And number one, I have to own every part of the thing that was hurtful about what I did. So it's not about a lot of explanation for why I would do that thing. It's just that thing must have hurt you in this way and this way and this way. And that is grievously wrong. And I am extremely sorry. And I really want to know if there's anything I can do to, in any level, repair this. That's to me as a gold standard for apology. Now, the gold standard for forgiveness there is no gold standard. I forgive her a thousand percent. And the reason for that isn't that she sent me what I consider a very not good apology and sort of the pantheon of apologies. The reason for that is I don't want to be changed to her in anger if I don't release her in a complete forgiveness so that I can look forward. Hey, she's 31. She's learning. She's trying to get her hustle on with this website. If I don't turn away from that and just say forgiven and mean it, even though I can laugh at how cruel it was and how much it hurt me, then I'll be chained to her forever, and I can't even really remember her name right now, so I totally, really legitimately forgive her. Right. I missed that part. Maybe perhaps you telegraph that in the last few minutes. Did she send you an apology? That was so I looked back on at the Twitter that day, and somebody said, that was really cruel, and she said, I've apologized privately, and that was my only second tweet. I was like, I didn't see any apology. And she said it was sent out at 05:28 p.m.. As though, like, I was maligning her about her apology, and she had the receipt for it, but then I found it. She had sent it to my work email, and it was a super long it started with, well, first place as an editor told me, and I was like, you're really right about that. She's like, why? A private apology for a public wrong? Yeah, that's the first mistake. Yeah, she said something really terrible about you in public, but you didn't apologize for it in public. You're sneaking it around this day. But I kind of scanned it. It was more upsetting to me in many ways. And then I thought, Hold on, there's a really good game I rarely play, but it's always a good game to play, which is like, what if I were an incredibly evolved, good person, which I'm not? What would the Buddha do exactly? They would accept the apology and not be lying about it. They would accept that there was some apologetic intention. And then my brilliant son Patrick, whose picture was in that, the article you're talking about his picture when he was a little boy, the day before I got cancers in there, he said, and then you would tell her to stay safe in this pandemic. And I'm like, oh, Patrick, that's the killer right attitude. Can I have it? And then I had to think through that several different ways, and I was like, yeah, I hope she stays safe. You know, she's a young woman. She's a physician. She's she did something really hurtful. I don't see any evidence that she I don't know. I just hope she does well, and I do forgive her completely. Now, forgiveness doesn't mean that you're open to be hurt by someone again. You don't make yourself vulnerable. You're not kumbaya we're not going out for high tea anytime soon, ever. But it just means I'm not changed to her anymore. I got a lot of other enemies to keep tight in my body, you think out loud rather freely, and that's what makes you such a delightful interlocutor. And so no doubt you have provoked people to send tweets of this sort in the past. Never this bad. I've had some bad tweets sent to my way. I've had some horrible reviews. No one has ever said, I hope she spends her remaining years atoning for sins she doesn't have. No one's gone that far. Yeah, well, I think we all hope that the good doctor spends the remaining years of her life learning to be less sanctimonious. I think that would be a good use of it. You know, she's going to be writing, we will like, in two days see her New York Times piece about how horrible we are to have had this discussion. Yeah, well, I'm trying to have it in a way that I will not feel the need to apologize for again. I'm holding her even on the heels of a bad apology. I think there would actually be a way for her to adequately apologize. Can you apologize for a bad apology? Can you pull yourself up by the final bootstrap here and get back to zero? I mean, can you imagine? I would not have had that level of self knowledge when I was her age. I'm 58. What if we could get her on the line right now and have a conversation? Do you think there's any way that conversation would go? Well, it would converge on a full reboot of basic human decency and we could all be friends. I would start it with someone much higher up on the feeding chain of my enemies than this one. I don't see any need to have any. I really think that maybe you need to be a lot more deathy to really understand how apology and forgiveness works and to really understand that forgiveness releases you and you don't have to. Do you'll see these people who forgive the killers of a loved one? Yeah, you can spare me from cancer for 500 years. I don't think that's going to be happening. But I can free myself from her. But I don't want to have but part of it is what I'm trying to say is just because you've forgiven someone doesn't mean it's a love in. And it certainly doesn't mean, as I always tell people who are in any kind of abusive relationship, it doesn't mean you let the abuser back into your life if they haven't shown any possible sign of having changed. You forgive them, but you keep your fence close to them. Yeah, you're talking about there's two layers of forgiveness here or two forms. So you can forgive somebody who is actually unrepentant, who's still, even in the extreme case, a danger to you without losing your awareness of the danger they represent. You want nothing more to do with them, but you can forgive them in some deeper whether the Christian model summarizes it or the Buddhist. What you can notice is to fail to forgive is to grasp some kind of hot coal of suffering, which you actually can release on your side. I mean, you there's no there's no reason to be carrying this person around in your mind with your hatred of them or your your anger or resentment so you can perform that miracle on your side, all the while leaving this person out there in the real world completely unchanged. What's interesting for me is the warranted forgiveness based on that person's true apology. I would love to fully understand what makes it possible for someone who has really wronged another person to become aware of it and apologize, and for that apology to be so sincere and real, such that genuine friendship between those two people is thereafter possible. That's the thing we need more of in our world. We also need the former. We need people just to be able to put down the burden of their reaction to assholes. Well, I often talk to young women about because some of the best minds of our generation or their generation some of the best minds of the generation that's young now that are female, half of it they just feel for reasons to protect themselves. They can't go on any kind of a public platform such as Twitter because these hideous, hideous things that flow back to them are so poisonous. And once it gets gendered, once you have really angry, anonymous men saying things to young, very public women, it gets into a place far, far beyond what this was about. And so I'm always telling them, don't worry about that. Pay no attention. It's nothing. It's pixels. It's somebody else on the other side who's just you're as remote to them as, like, Richard Nixon, who's dead and gone. You're just like a public figure. They don't think if they're not having any kind of personal communication with you, just ignore it. So I tried to live into the advice that I always give young women, which is just this had a little more bite, as I say, because she publishes where I publish, and because I said, I have children. I want to live for their graduation. And she told me to, like, I should use my remaining years atoning for a sin that she's divined that I have. But that was edited out. Forget your children. Just spend the free hours becoming less racist and less anti feminist. Yes, that's the project. And if she thought that The Atlantic would public the Atlantic began. It was founded by abolitionists, thought that they would be, oh, we have this racist writer. Let's just lightly edit her for tone is absurd. There was another thing I noticed. I've thought about this before. I don't know if we've spoken about it. This doctor is obviously very focused on the problem of privilege, and I looked at her Twitter feed after I saw this tweet, and there's. Just a lot of stuff about privilege and wokeness more or less wall to wall. But I couldn't help but notice that she's a very attractive woman. Right. And this is a form of privilege that few of us are talking about, but it is as real as privilege gets, as just being a beautiful woman or a very handsome man is not nothing in this world. And I guess it sort of compounds the irony here, but it struck me as a final layer of a lack of awareness. If you look like Padma Lakshmi and you're going on and on about privilege, there's a ridiculousness to the project. When you think of the advantages that just effortlessly flow to people who are very attractive in our culture, you have to at least take the wokeness game a little more lightly than you would otherwise. How do you think of that form of privilege in our society? Well, first place, if there's anything in the world she is not unaware of, it would be her beauty, I would say. Just the way she displays herself brightly. So beautiful young woman. There's a wonderful English expression that at age 50, you get the face you deserved like that. It is going through life as a beautiful or a pretty or attractive young woman. Oh, man. A lot of doors fly open and you're intensely aware that it's going to stop, but then you kind of charter over into confused older lady and they open the doors too. So maybe it's not as dire, but for sure I would say more to the point is that she's Canadian and she's presenting herself as a sufferer of the ancient wrongs against people of color in this nation, which is just a very odd I missed that point. Odd part of it. But I don't even want to let's not talk about her anymore. I don't want to think about it. Maybe she's a Russian bot. Maybe we just have been successfully trolled. Well, only a Russian bot could troll the op ed section of the New York Times. It's just a matter of time. Yeah. Okay. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the goal of this post mortem amita was not to be mean spirited, but to try to extract whatever lessons can be found in in yet another amazing installment of social media in the midst of the deathy situation we call life. Right. Oh, that's a good title for a book. Kind of a cheesy book, but one I wish I could write and make a fortune on because it sounds like something I would buy. Okay, so before we move on to even more superficial topics than Twitter, so what is your understanding of your prognosis now? And just one of the points of your article was the way in which this COVID pandemic has compounded the hassle, among other things, of just dealing with ongoing cancer treatment. Give us a picture of your current situation and these are some of the implications of the pandemic that people aren't really thinking about. We think about elective procedure as not being done, but an elective procedure is a cancer scan or even in some cases a cancer surgery. Bring us up to the moment with your health. Well, part of having cancer at this stage is that you have to get a lot of Pet CT scans because you have to find out if the treatment you're on is working and if it has the cancer stable or if the cancer is growing during in the presence of this treatment. Meaning you have to get a different treatment, you have to change your treatment. And then because of very long story with these other cancer treatments I've had in the past, they have given me certain other problems that have to be checked a lot that I gained because I was treated for cancer. So I should have really had a Pet CT scan probably a month ago and I will have it this month on the 27th because they're really trying to push anything they can do. I don't know, really. In the beginning, if it was because they felt that the hospitals out here in California would be overrun as they have been in New York City, or if they just wanted patients that have these underlying conditions to stay out of, hospitals that are so full of every kind of thing floating around could be COVID as well. As much as possible. I don't know. But at a certain point you have to get your scan. So I'll go there and then I have to go a lot to get my infusions. So with that it's just a lot of like they call you first and ask you the questions and then you're out in the about symptoms. Do you have any of the symptoms? No. And I would love to have a test for this thing because I wonder if in early January I might have kind of been exposed to it because I was a bit sick in early January and so it was my husband and he'd just come back from New York. But the beautiful, perfect, available tests are not as perfectly beautifully available as we've been led to believe. But anyways, then they take your temperature and then finally they let you in to the infusion space and you're kind of like I've made it to this horrible place where I get treated for cancer but everyone there is really nice. So there's a lot of just things you have to jump over and I'm not parking down in the basement because I don't want to have more people in my car but I want to go down there to give a tip to the guys I know. So it's all a little bit challenging, I'll admit, but a lot of people are in a lot worse situation and are you still taking her septin or has it moved on to other drugs. Well, now I take her septin because obviously it failed me because I'd been on her septin every three weeks for eleven years. So I started to the cancer assert itself more strongly against it, but I still get it in combination with this other drug that's now in the armamentorium called Progetta, and then with an injection of huge horse size injections of something else every three weeks. The thing is, I'll be on treatment the rest of my life until or unless something better comes along or more definitively, curative. So the first one that I tried was doing a good job, but I just couldn't imagine living my life on it. I was just too sick from it, right? I mean, I was nowhere near as sick as I was on actually being on chemo. And it was a chemo, but it was this smart bomb kind of chemo where it goes through your body and it only explodes inside a cancer cell, which is wonderful, but it does still, so you don't lose your hair or anything, but it does still left me really tired and kind of sick. So then I switched up to this new treatment. So there's a lot in the armamentorium and it just goes to show when you throw a whole lot of money and a whole lot of science at one very particular problem, you start getting some answers to it. Science is real, I guess. Well, needless to say, vast numbers of people love you who haven't even met you because your spirit comes through so clearly in your voice, both on the page and in conversation. I think not meeting me is probably inducive to me. This could be the sweet spot. Just enough, Caitlin. It's my next book. Your next book? Okay, so pivoting to. In some ways these are equally existential topics because we're talking about the fate of global civilization here when we're talking about politics at the moment. But in our last podcast, you and I said that I think we call that the New York Times, but a general journalist would have to deal with the target scam if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@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, entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, very brief housekeeping here. Once again, my meditation app is available@wakingup.com, and if you're using the app and finding it valuable, your reviews are incredibly helpful. Please leave those in the App Store or in the Android store. And any reports about bugs, please send directly to wakingup.com. We are continually fixing those and pushing new updates, so please make sure you're using the latest version. My major priority for this year is to make the waking up course as good as it can be. So thank you for all the feedback. Today I'm speaking with Sally Settle. Sally is a practicing psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine. She's an expert on addiction, and she focuses on mental health policy as well as political trends in medicine and psychiatry. And her most recent book is Brainwashed the Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, which she wrote with Scott Lillianfeld. Anyway, we talk about addiction. We discuss the opiate epidemic and the significance of fentanyl. We talk about PTSD. We cover the intrusion of politics into medicine. We also talk about the ethics of organ markets, the buying and selling of organs. Anyway, fascinating conversation. This is one that I hope will be of practical use to anyone who either has suffered from addiction or knows someone suffering. There were a few connection and latency issues that you'll hear, but nothing too terrible. This is what happens when you do these interviews remotely. In any case, I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And now I bring you Sally satellite. You were recommended to me by our mutual friend, Steve Pinker. It was a fulsome recommendation of your expertise on many topics that we're going to touch, and here you are. So thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thank you. And thanks to Steve Pinker. Obviously a great fan of his and yours. I'm a longtime podcast listener, so yeah, so you were reminded me we met at one of those beyond belief conferences at the the Salk Institute back in in 2006 or so. Yeah, I think it was more like 2009. It was quite a while ago. And yeah, it was very interesting. I think I was writing a book at that time with Scott Lillianfeld on the promise and peril of neuroscience in the public square that was a very important meeting for me, actually. I learned about a lot of people's work there and I was familiar with yours, but I heard your talk and I remember I spoke on since I'm a clinician, I'm a psychiatrist. So I try to stick with clinical matters and see most things through that lens. How brain science, how junk science all refracts through a clinical lens? So I spoke about post traumatic stress disorder and how it is both a product of brain and mind, other words, mechanism, which is brain function and meaning. And that in my field, I think we've tended to be a little reductionist about it and see it largely through the lens of anxiety, of a fear response that hasn't extinguished after the stressor has gone away, which is, to me, the essence of continuing fear. And that's very highly legitimate. And, of course, one of the best therapies is exposure therapy, which touches on that mechanism. But there is so much more to post traumatic stress disorder in terms of what keeps it alive for people, and that often has to do with meaning. That was my yeah, I want to talk about that. There are many intersecting issues here with addiction and the opioid epidemic and PTSD, and so I want to dive into all that. But first, more generally, how do you view your work as a psychiatrist? Because you're sort of at the nexus of clinical work on these various fronts, but also you comment on the politicization of science and medicine, and there's kind of, to some degree, a culture war component to what you've been doing. How do you summarize your approach to psychiatry? Well, very much there is a culture or component. In fact, I wrote a book back in 2001 called PCMD. How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine. And and then I collaborated with Christina off Summers in 2005 on a book called One Nation Under Therapy, and both of those books had a very thick thread of politicized science or even junk medicine. And in fact, in a way, so much of it comes down to the critiques often came down to explanatory reductionism. And and as an addiction psychiatrist, that's my main field. And I do work I do work part time in a methadone clinic. I've done that for about 20 years. And this year, I'm actually spending the year in a small town in Ohio trying to understand the I even call it an addiction epidemic at this point. Not just an opioid epidemic in a small town compared to an urban area. And there are lots of interesting differences we can talk about. But the overarching, I guess almost everything I've written has to do with some sort of perversion of the data or some sort of questionable interpretation. And so just give you an example. Take, for example, post traumatic stress disorder, since I brought that up, a reductionist approach, and not an incorrect one, but just one explanatory level would be at the level of the amygdala, at the level of neuroscience. I'm not saying it's illegitimate at all. It's very real, it's very true, but it's just one level. And when you reduce things to one level, we do that in addiction as well. Now, the dominant view of addiction is that it's a brain disease. And anytime you reduce things to one level, it's it's obviously a precursor to oversimplification. And when you're in the clinical world and policy world, that's usually a recipe for a bad policy. And it's also a recipe for politicization because it can foster a victim narrative, because someone if there's a certain level of explanation that can be traced back to a perpetrator, then it becomes a victim narrative. And any time again, there's someone to blame. And in the case of the opioid crisis, there's been much focus on, of course, the pharmaceutical companies, and I do think they bear some responsibility, don't get me wrong, but it also very much fits into litigation. But of course, as a clinician, I'm most concerned with how it may undermine the best kind of care. So pretty much everything I've written about, yeah, it goes to these kinds of oversimplifications and what's being left out. Now we have to be more nuanced. Right, let's start with addiction, because it is obviously an enormous problem and many people listen to this podcast will either have some firsthand experience with it themselves or know somebody suffering with some version of it. What should we understand about addiction at this point? I should reference another podcast I did, which I don't know, you may have heard. Do you know Johann Hari? The journalist? So he's written a couple of books, one on the war on drugs and addiction, Chasing the Scream, and the other on depression, Lost Connections. He came on the podcast and he's a great speaker and a very interesting guy. But he's taken a line through both of those topics that seems to deemphasize the role of biochemistry and the disease model, certainly of addiction, and puts the blame far more on the lack of meaning and lack of connectedness that someone may experience in their life. And he draws a lot of motivation from a few experiments. One is famously described as the Rat Park experiment, which you probably know about. So in the aftermath of that podcast, I received some angry pushback from people who didn't like that line at all. In Johann's defense, he doesn't actually discount the role of biochemistry, but if you get him talking, he can certainly seem to. One question off the top is, is there much daylight between your view of addiction and the one he's putting forward? And whatever your view is, what do you think people should understand at this moment about? I think there's a little daylight. I agree with you. I think one could walk away from his excellent work. I admire him very much. But you could walk away from that with perhaps an undue emphasis on the cultural, social, psychological dimensions. However, I think that my profession or the addiction field has over medicalized addiction. And I don't say that as someone who is not enthralled to the technology of brain imaging, but I think we have over medicalized it to the point where we put too much emphasis on the I'll call them anti addiction medications. People call it mat, and I'm referring there to methadone, bubinorphine, and then there's another medication now, TREXone, which is an opioid blocker. These are all excellent medications, and I use them every day. I'm going to prescribe them. And occasionally there is a patient who gets on methadone, and I would say he would fit the classic medical model, which is to say that addiction is something almost imposed on you, even. We call it a person with substance use disorder. And I realize in medicine we have to give things shorthand names, but I even cringe sometimes when I hear that because it makes it sound as if it's something that happened to you. And addiction is a very intricate and deeply personal kind of affliction. So, for example, basically I see things on a large spectrum, and as a clinician, you take people as individuals. But occasionally I'll see a person who says, all I need is the methadone and I'll be fine. And usually that's not the case. They're on the methadone. So what does that mean? Methadone, of course, is an opioid replacement. It's a synthetic opioid, actually. Can you remind people, why is the transition from heroin or another opiate to methadone advantageous at all? Why is it given as a treatment? Well, if one is abruptly withdrawn or one loses supply to opioids and they've been on it chronically and on a substantial dose for a while, even though some people low doses can even precipitate withdrawal when they stop it abruptly. And that's basically just your body just already adapted. There's been neuro adaptation to the chronic exposure. And so there's a withdrawal syndrome. And it can be very intense, extremely intense, to the point where some people will continue using drugs just to avert the withdrawal. People feel extremely ill. It's been called the worst flu you've ever had. Nausea, evolving shakes last about 72 hours at its worst, and then it's over in about a week. Some people have documented what's called a protracted withdrawal syndrome, which is sort of a low grade withdrawal, which could go on even for months. And so it's highly destabilizing, and you can't break the cycle. A lot of people can't break the cycle on their own, I should add. Many people do, and clinicians don't see them. But the folks we see obviously have a very hard time stopping drugs on their own. So to suppress the withdrawal symptom, there's this replacement opioid. It's called methadone. And buprenorphine, which is a partial agonist methadone is a full agonist. Mureceptor will suppress the withdrawal and it also suppresses craving. So as you can imagine, that's an excellent way to break the cycle and stabilize someone. For most people it's not enough. It's necessary, but it's far from sufficient. They have so much repair work to do. Not only do they have to repair all the damage to their life that was done while they were addicted, all the bridges they've burned, all the relationships they've destroyed, all the jobs they may have lost, the reputation, the health, there is also the problem of what predisposed them to using in the first place. And this is where I'm very much with Johan in saying that most, but not all, but most people I've treated most addiction memoirs well, all addiction memoirs I've read talk to a kind of psychic, profound psychic distress. It often takes the form of self loathing as one of the most prominent themes. But other people want to repress painful memories. Some people, I think, just should have been on a better dose of Prozac or something else because they're using it to deal with anxiety and depression. And sometimes conventional medication can be what they need, but other times it's a more existential kind of lostness. And these drugs really help. They really do. And sometimes they're a very good they're just a good numbing agent. In fact, I refer to them as oblivions. You've heard of stimulants and depressants have a new class called oblivions. And in fact, that's what Morphine is, right? It's Morpheus from the god of morpheus who lived by the river. I'm going to mispronounce this because I'm not a Greek scholar, but lethe and that's the river of oblivion. So and these drugs, of course, have a profound history. So that's what the that's what replacement opioids do and that's huge, but it's rarely enough. Now, occasionally there's a person for whom it is enough. This is a person, let's say, for whom the withdrawal was so or the avoidance of withdrawal was such a powerful engine for continued use, that once you took care of as a clinician, once we basically treated the withdrawal, the person had enough social capital. Just had enough of a social network to be able to get back on his or her feet, just with a medication. That happens to be rare in my experience, but it would happen. And in that case, I would say the person fit the medical model more snugly. But in most cases, in fact, we think of addiction or b. I say we because Scott Williamsfield and I have written about this quite a bit. We think about it as operating on many different levels simultaneously, obviously on the neurobiological plane, but on the psychological one, on the behavioral one. It's incredible how important cues can be, how important conditioning is in perpetuating drug use and also in treating drug use. Because, of course, one of the first things you try to get to patients to work on is identifying the kinds of kinds of situations, the kind of internal mood states, the kind of people they're around that get them craving. And that's a pure Pavlovian phenomenon. And that's part of cognitive behavioral therapy for addiction, is to get people to recognize these things. And sometimes they're obvious. You don't drive by your dealer's house. I had a school teacher once who had to get what do you call those things? Like a marker board as opposed to a chalkboard, because a chalk dust reminded him of cocaine. Right. Well, what is the role of AA in kind of framing our beliefs around addiction? Because there's this model that specifically an alcoholic is somebody who is irretrievably suffering from a kind of disease. And once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. I actually don't have direct experience with AA or addiction. I may be getting it slightly wrong in terms of just how they place emphasis on this, but what's your view of the role AA has played in all of this? And in what sense is addiction a disease? And what sense does that analogy break down? I actually don't consider AA the source of what I think is a problematic medicalization I attribute that to the National Institute on Drug Abuse and we can get back to that. But as far as AA is concerned, interestingly, in the early 30s it did not use the word disease. But in any case, if you look at the Twelve Steps, there's so much about they do have a spiritual dimension to them. There's a big emphasis on the so called moral inventory. Not moral as in you're a morally flawed person, that addicts are morally flawed people. Just that in many cases, so many I'll use their word amends need to be made. And going back to I suppose what Johan would, where I agree with him is that so much addiction flows from so much personal unhappiness that you want to also go back to the origins of why you even became addicted in the first place. I find AA, I personally have trouble with a higher power. I don't quite understand that, and I don't understand the surrender when in fact you're doing all the work. So that because they have that and what are the steps? I surrender my will, I believe. In any case, there seem to be paradoxes, but the point is so many millions of people have found it useful. But as far as being a disease, I think if you took a poll, the majority of Americans see it that way. And I try not to debate it. And I do make a different distinction between disease, which is somewhat metaphorical, and a brain disease, which reifies it much more as a physiological problem and a physiological problem almost only. But when people say to me, and I found this very interesting in this small town I'm working in Ohio, that a few of the nurses and social workers have said to me they kind of lower their voice because they know they're being politically incorrect here. But do I really think that you're a psychiatrist. Is addiction really a disease? And I like the fact that they asked me that question. Now, if there were some crusty old sheriff who just wanted to lock people up and didn't want his deputies to be administering the lock zone, the overdose reversal drug, and didn't want to be bothered with these folks, that would be a whole different discussion. And there I'd say, yes, it's a disease. Because my my usual response to that question is what are my choices? Because my choices is that it's a moral failure or it's a sin. Well, then I'm going with disease. But I'd like to be able to be more nuanced about it when I have these conversations. I'll just stipulate if for some people it's very important to embrace that disease model, for others, less so. But I just say so if addiction is a disease, then it's more most important for us to say, well, what kind of disease is it? Because unlike one of the many slogans one here is lately, addiction is not a disease like any other. And that's important to know. And I'll get into that in a minute. But I would like to say that I acknowledge why the National Institute of Drug Abuse, which is responsible for this brain disease formulation and so many other advocacy groups endorse that, that I do see the virtues in it. I understand that they were trying to rest it out of the realm of criminal justice. And of course, I endorsed that. They wanted more funding for treatment and research. And those are completely laudable goals. They think it can erase stigma. I don't believe it can. And there's a lot of interesting research, some of it by Nick Haslam, who's an Australian cognitive behaviorist, and others who have shown that the more you medicalize a behavior problem, actually, the more you increase social desire for social distance on the part of others and the more it induces a sense of therapeutic nihilism. And there's also research showing that patients who endorse a disease model for themselves actually don't quite do as well because there's a sense of the loss of self efficacy that goes along with that. But again, these are studies as a clinician, you deal with everyone on a personal level. To be honest, Sam, it never comes up when you're treating someone, these concepts just never come up. You just deal with how do you put 1ft in front of the other? One of the skills you have to use to stay clean. And then at some point, people get enough sober time, abstinence time, where they can start exploring if they're interested. What are some of the kinds of problems that preceded their drug use in the first place, because some of those vulnerabilities still exist and put them at risk. But we don't do classic depth psychotherapy. We're not getting into childhood traumas or primitive events because those are anxiety provoking. And that's the last thing you want to do for a person whose habit has been to look for a drug when they feel anxious. So for many years of therapy, I'm not saying people have to be in therapy for many years. Hopefully they internalize a lot of these skills for themselves. But the effort is very much pragmatic and I would say cognitive behaviorally based in terms of therapy therapy, and then in terms of rebuilding their lives again, vocationally, getting their kids back if they've lost them, getting jobs back, regaining trust, establishing a healthy social network, these kinds of things. But that's interesting. So the classical talk therapy, you're saying in this case, certainly in the acute stage after cessation of drug use is counterproductive because just kind of endlessly taking an inventory of all of your past suffering that may or may not explain how you got here. Just produces the the negative mental states that people want to self medicate away from in the first place. Exactly. And some patients have said to me, well, shouldn't I be talking about because they see a psychiatrist and they have this because most people in the addiction world are not treated by psychiatrists. They're treated by counselors or social workers. But I'm the psychiatrist, so maybe they have Freudian images, I don't know. And they say, maybe I should be talking about my childhood. And then I explain just what I said to you. I explain to them and they say that makes a lot of sense. And I say that's a luxury you will have after you've been after you've stable for quite a while. If you still feel that's important to you, then you can pursue it. And luckily they seem to accept that. And of course they're free to go to someone else who will do that with them. Although I think most people who are sophisticated about working with people with drug problems would not do that kind of exploratory work in an early stage. Is it simply an empirical fact that people who can cross some line into a clear substance abuse pattern can't then go back and let's take alcohol as the normal social lubricant? Is it possible for someone to become a, quote, healthy social drinker after having had a problem with alcohol? Or is the AA model of once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, a fair description of no, I would not say that's fair, although it's very common. Certainly it is probably not a good idea for someone who's had a severe alcohol problem to attempt moderate drinking. Presumably they tried that along the way. However, there is a group and it's I think it's legitimate, it's called moderation management and it does have membership. And then it has there certainly is a subpopulation of individuals who who can return to controlled drinking as a clinician by the time they get see by the time someone gets to a clinician, you have to remember there's so many layers at which people have peeled themselves off. I mean, let's take this situation of two people who go they seem to be matched on almost every variable and they're both curious about, like what, let's say cocaine, because most people have, I suppose, experienced alcohol, but they're going to a party and they know there's going to be cocaine there. And they both say, look, we'll make a pack. We'll both try it, see what it's like. And one of them tries it and his reaction is which is actually most people's reaction the first time they try cocaine and most people's reaction the first time they use a heroin as they throw up. But the other friend tries it and says, oh my God, this is fantastic. Now, that's very interesting. And that's where I think more biologically oriented folks stop and frankly, you could build a whole career on figuring out why are those reactions different? Because I think they're mediated through neurochemistry differently. But now here's another scenario where these two friends, two more friends go to a party, they know they're going to be cocaine. One of them tries it and says, oh my God, this is fantastic. It gives me more. And the other one says, oh my God, this is fantastic. Get it the hell away from me. And that's very interesting. So that's someone who peeled off at the very first step. Then you have people who peel off in terms of quitting use after they've used a few times and they came home late and their wife gives them a dirty look and she says, what have you been doing? And they don't think, okay, I don't want to go down this road. Well, you can see where this is going. Then there are people who lose their job or about to lose their job and they think, wow, I better get it together. And then there are the people I see who, despite so many of these consequences, didn't quite get it together. Now, there's always one consequence that brings them in and why that one and not the one before is the alchemy of addiction. I don't know why there are too many variables because everyone who's walked into our clinic practically is there because a spouse is going to leave them, a boss is going to fire them or a probation officer is going to violate them. And that goes to one of the reasons why I find the brain disease formulation, which privileges so much the neurobiological level, why find it problematic. Because it takes our eye off several other levels of explanation. One of them being that addiction is a behavior that responds to consequences. It responds to sanctions and incentives. And so if you read the early papers, in fact, the brain disease was officially unveiled in 197 in an article in in Science, the definition why it was a brain disease, I kid you not, because addiction changes the brain. Well, this conversation changes the brain, so that's absurd. Yeah, but you could everything changes the brain. Well, okay. In what way does it change the brain? Does it change the brain in which people have no choice but to use or but to continue to use? And we know that's true just because of what I told you, because people because there's an enormous literature on contingency management, which is how you manipulate the incentives and sanctions to help people stop. And one of the most fascinating, I'd say if I had to sum up all the diction science in one vignette, it would be the Vietnam Veterans experience, which I'll I'll tell you, this was 71. And I remember the New York Times in the fall in the spring of 71 reported on the Department of Defense research on all the veteran, all the GIS in Vietnam that were addicted addicted not just using, but addicted to opium and heroin and really good high grade Southeast Asian stuff. And that's no surprise, in a way, because what is war? It's terror and boredom. And what are drugs good for? Terror and boredom. Plus, there was this was towards the end of the towards the end of the war, and there was so much demoralization and such a sense of betrayal by so many that there was just a simmering rage that a lot of these men had. So drugs worked for that. Drugs were totally normalized in the military at that point in Vietnam. They were abundant. So every possible every possible variable that lowers the threshold for using a drug was there. They had access. It was normalized. It was good quality, and they had a reason for using it. Well, Nixon was terrified, and there was already a heroin problem in the urban centers, and he was afraid that these men would come back and seed that population even further of heroin users. So he instituted a program which has the best name in the world, operation Gold and Flow. And as you might guess, basically, it said, for those of you whose year is up, whose tour of duty is up, you will not be allowed back in the States until you pee in a cup and there's nothing in it but your pee. And actually, once they were told this, the folks who were about to leave, the vast majority of them were able to stop using on their own. They did offer some treatment in Vietnam for those who had more trouble, and then they left. Now, these GI La Mao veterans were followed by Lee Robbins of Washington University, who wrote a paper in which she said, this has blown the title of it, or the subtitle was something like, the data I'm about to present now Blows Out of the Water. This once addicted, always addicted meme. And what she found following these guys for three years was that very. Few of them resumed use of heroin 12% over a three year period. The majority of those who resumed use had a prior use. In other words, a use that predated their deployment. And that the reason she interviewed many of them subset and they said, well, we had lives to live. Now we're back in the States. We have families, we have responsibilities. If we wanted to continue to use heroin, we'd have to go into these terrible neighborhoods now. It's easier. People will deliver. But of course, it was totally stigmatized. And that, to me, is the full spectrum of so many of the dynamics that are involved with addiction. Yeah, well, the context clearly matters to context. What do we know, though, about the behavioral genetics here? Is it well understood that there are a gene or genes that govern a person's susceptibility to falling into addiction regardless of context? I'm not a behavioral geneticist, but I'm going to say that whenever you're in the realm of behavior in humans, it's rare that one gene is responsible. So everything and most things in psychiatry are highly polygenic. But I have no doubt that there are some people whose circuitry is genetically built so that they find their reward system is more sensitive, that their locus aurelius is much more attuned to the withdrawal phenomenon so that it's much less tolerable we have impulse, of course there's the issue of impulse control. I mean, one becomes a highly steep discounter in the course of being an addict. Some people are steep discounters before they become one and that probably predisposes them. But it's usually a combination of many things. We know that so called adverse childhood experiences predisposed, but they're all predisposing. And one could argue, for example, that if everyone in your family were an alcoholic, to the extent that anyone might use that as a justification for why they became an alcoholic, one could just as easily say, well, you saw what it was like then it was your job to not drink at all. Something like that. So that can also go both ways. Right. So now, on the spectrum of difficulty in kicking an addiction, where do these various drugs and substances lie? Can you generalize about how hard it is to get off of heroin versus the pharmaceutical opioids that people are having problems with now versus alcohol and anything else? Well, as far as opioids, a lot of this is obviously dose dependent and often root of administration dependent. But conceivably, it could be as hard to get off opioids as prescription opioids, especially if you've crushed them up and snort or injecting them as heroin. There should be probably no difference. Interestingly, nicotine is considered the most addictive drug, but that is highly conflated with the fact that smoking itself as a behavior is addicted, highly addictive, arguably more so than nicotine itself. The ritual of it and the social the ritual of it, yes, the social aspect of it. But also the fact that you talk about context, of course it's hard to of course the uptake, it's called capture. The capture rate for nicotine is about one in four. In other words, if you start smoking with some regularity, probably continue to smoke with regularity, whereas with heroin, other drugs, it's more like one in ten. Why would that be? It looks like when you hear a capture, a one in four, you think, wow, that must be highly addictive. But think about the context. Nicotine is legal, I mean, in the form of cigarettes. Nicotine is ubiquitous. Admittedly, cigarettes are much more maligned nowadays, and for good reason than they were, but still. And nicotine, and this perhaps is one of the most important aspects, it's not an intoxicant, it doesn't affect your performance, if anything, and might enhance it in some ways, so that the consequences for using for smoking are so much less and so much less immediate. And that's that's very important too, because of course you can get lung cancer and devastating diseases, but they're so delayed, whereas the consequences for intoxicants come much sooner. So all these play in to the fact that someone would sustain their use. But that's over and above the base addictiveness of nicotine itself. And that's also why cigarettes are so hard to quit. And that's been misconstrued as nicotine being one of the most addictive drugs in the world. But that's not true. And where does marijuana fit in here? Is there an addictive component to it? Or is there some other category of compulsive use that shouldn't be categorized as addiction? Actually, the physical addiction, the physical withdrawal that I explained before, that you get from opioids, that you would get from alcohol, you would get from barbiturates, you would get from benzodiazepines, like Xanaxo withdrawal, those were considered the hallmark of withdrawal. But ever since cocaine, ever since the 80s, that's been downplayed as an indicator of addiction, because cocaine and the Stimulants don't have that kind of physiological picture. They have their own discontinuation syndrome, there's no question. So some drugs have that and some drugs don't. I have to say I'm not that expert in marijuana. I do know that because the potency is so much greater now than it was when sure, we may be a little older than you, but I think we were both we probably had the same marijuana, though. So much of this back to the concept of capture. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with 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@samharris.org./n

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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I'm speaking with Oliver Burkeman. Oliver is a feature writer for The Guardian, where he wrote a long running weekly column on psychology. He's also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other publications. He's also written a few books, most recently, 4000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals, which is a book that I really loved. It is certainly not your usual time management book and touches upon some of the deepest questions in life. And in what sense should we even be thinking about time as a resource anyway? We get into many aspects of this. We talk about our relationship to time, the perils of efficiency, being versus becoming, parenting and childhood, the notion of work life balance, the loss of leisure, the trap of planning, social isolation, the idea of a modern Sabbath, and other topics. Anyway, this conversation is all too timely as we careen into December here, the end of the year being the time where many of us think about reprioritizing things. Just how did we spend this year? That seemed like it was four months long, so I hope you find the conversation useful. And now I bring you Oliver Burkman. I am here with Oliver Burkeman. Oliver, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for inviting me. So I'm not aware if we've ever met. I think you've interviewed me once or twice, but tell me our history together. I think that's right. I think that we haven't ever met. I fairly recently consulted you for a piece that I was writing for The Guardian on free will. That was our most recent interaction, I think. Yeah, but was there a time before that as well? You know, there might have been a time before that when we exchanged less friendly words via Twitter, which tends to do that to people. All right. Apologies for anything. Unfortunately, no. I'm sure it was me being impertinent. Anyway, it's all in the past. Well, great to turn the tables on you and to be interviewing you about your book, the title of which is 4000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals. And it's really a it's a fantastic book. It's the we'll we'll get into the way in which it breaks the mold for the topic of time management. But before we do, can you summarize your background as a writer and journalist and just how you came to this topic? Sure. I worked for a very long time on the staff and then as a freelance contracted person for The Guardian. One of the things I did for many years, just until a couple of years ago, was to write a weekly column on, I guess, self help culture, the science of happiness, productivity, all that kind of whole sector. And on the one hand this is an amazing opportunity to explore all sorts of fascinating modalities and research and the rest of it I think it probably also served as a slightly as a sort of an enabler of various problematic tendencies in myself. If you're the kind of person who wants to spend your life exploring methods of productivity rather than actually getting on with things and being productive, then it's great to be able to have the excuse that you're doing it for work purposes. So in a way this book was sort of came out the other end of that. It was like after spending many years trying to find the perfect productivity technique or the perfect time management technique and failing. So before we jump into the iconoclastic and heretical take you have on this topic, maybe we should just at the outset say whatever can be said in support of the obvious virtues of time management. We're just acknowledging the problem and reclaiming whatever baby is in that bathwater. What do you think actually survives scrutiny here in terms of the standard advice? Well, clearly time management matters. I try to make the case. I think that it matters even more than the people who have promoted that sort of standard version would claim. It has this reputation as a slightly sort of narrow topic but it's actually on some level surely the whole of life is the whole challenge of constructing a meaningful life is a question of time management. And then I would say that there's definitely some room for becoming more efficient and more strategic and there are things that we all do in our days that we could do in less time and make savings around the edges in that way. I have plenty to say that's critical about that sort of efficiency and optimization based approach to using one's time. But I think that there's no doubt that there are ways of organizing your daily schedule that will see you spend less time switching between less time on email than you otherwise would or more time on the things that you truly care about. So it's certainly not all nonsense. Maybe we can start with one of the paradoxes or perverse dynamics here where the focus on efficiency leads strangely to a subversion of one's deeper priorities. There's so many ways into this that you explore in your book but maybe we can start with this all too common impulse of feeling the need to clear the decks before one can actually do the important stuff. And so much of time management amounts to recommendations around this kind of thing, doing things more efficiently, getting one's to do list truly clear, getting to inbox zero. What's wrong with the level of focus when one approaches it that way? I mean, I think we're all familiar with this problem, it's just that don't always put a name to it or sort of see it in objective terms. But this general problem, I think, is that if you focus on efficiency as the governing value in your personal use of time and I think this probably applies to all sorts of other systems as well and it's recognized in those other contexts. All else being equal, a more efficient system will simply attract and process more inputs. If you get really good at getting through your email, you will receive more email because you will reply to people at a greater tempo, at a faster tempo, and those replies will generate replies. And you'll develop a reputation in your organization as someone who's responsive to email, so more people will be worth their while to send you email. So that's just one example. But this is Parkinson's Law, the idea that the work expands to fill the time available for its completion. It's just this basic problem that efficiency pursued as the governing value leads to more stuff coming in that you have to process. And for other reasons that I can talk about, I think it also leads to a lower quality of stuff, right? It focuses you on spending more and more time on the things that you don't particularly value. And so if you take that approach of trying to clear the decks before you get round to the important stuff firstly, the decks will never be clear anyway because of the world we live in is we are finite and the potential number of little things to do is effectively infinite. And secondly, the act of trying to clear the decks increases the number of things on the decks. So it's a very sort of a very sort of counterintuitive stance that is required, I think, to sort of allow the decks to be too full and to sort of allow the feeling of being overwhelmed to exist and nonetheless, at the same time to spend an hour or the first part of the day or whatever on the thing that you really want to prioritize. It's not how we're conditioned to approach the feeling of being overwhelmed. There seems to be this psychological quirk at the bottom of all of this, which is we don't want to admit the fundamental limits of what we can do. I mean just the basic fact that doing any one thing is synonymous with not doing an infinite number of things. So if you're going to spend an hour reading a book, you're spending that hour if in fact you are merely reading that book and not doing ten other things with your phone, there are an infinite number of things you are neglecting to do for that full hour. And in some sense we don't want to admit this to ourselves and we want to live with the illusion that if we could just control things better than we've been to date, we could do more or less everything that we want to do, should do, feel we must do. And what that allows for is what that encourages is a failure to triage at the first opportunity to admit to yourself okay there's I've got 24 hours in the day, I will never have a longer day than that. And therefore if I'm not doing these most important things first, they're vulnerable to my doing far less important, less rewarding things in the meantime. And this is something you explore at various points in the book. The embrace of our limitation, the recognition that this finite resource of attention allows us to live with, as you say, the decks not being remotely clear and focus on the most important stuff, whereas actually not acknowledging the limitations. Causes us to just respond to the email we need never have responded to in preference for that most important thing that is yet once again not getting touched today. Yeah, right. Exactly. I mean, for me, this is the core of it all this deep discomfort that we have with confronting how limited we are, not just in terms of quantity of time, I think, but also control over the unfolding of time, the degree to which we are just rafts on the white waters of the river of Time and have really relatively little control over how things go. And the wonderfully alluring thing about chasing this promise of total productivity, total optimization, being completely in control and having everything sorted out at last, it never comes. Because yeah, it would entail being non limited when in fact we are limited. But there's always the sense that it might just be around the corner, it might just be in the future. And that was my experience for years as a total sort of paid up productivity geek. It was not that I had everything working brilliantly and could do everything that was thrown at me but it was always like it was maybe only a few weeks away that I would have this system set up and everything would be perfect. So there's this kind of constant future allure that you're eventually going to get your time sorted out, which really just means break through the limitations of the human condition with respect to time. And because it always feels like it's coming, right, that's a reason not to face the discomfort that would be entailed by saying, okay, it's never coming. I am going to end up neglecting in this life huge numbers of things that matter and that would have been a legitimate use of my time along with lots of other less meaningful things. I'm going to end up neglecting lots of them. It's going to happen whatever I do. And so at some point I've just got to apply myself to a few things that seem like the most important the most important things? Yeah, there's this piece of corporate speak that has worked its way into my vocabulary despite my best intentions and I find that myself using this phrase a lot because it does capture this ever present problem and it's the phrase opportunity cost and it comes down to the need to decide. You actually break open. The etymology of the word decide in your book, from the Latin to cut off to decide what to do is, by definition, to circumscribe something and separate it from everything that it's not. And I guess there's something on the other side of this. There is something to having a carefree attitude too, and just allowing yourself to wander within certain limits and discover what happens of itself. But even that kind of experience needs to be prioritized, given the world in which we live. So inevitably we have to confront this fact that we to not decide is also a to make some sort of decision you know, by default you're going to be just left with whatever habit pattern is being played upon by circumstance. So it seems to me that the focus for making any kind of change in the quality of one's life has to be around this variable of deciding what it is that's really worth your time and attention and noticing all the ways in which your life is buffeting you away from those priorities. And it takes this continuous act of recalibration. Because as much as we may be intellectually aware of the finiteness of life and the transitoryness of everything, in some sense we're really not aware of it, we're not emotionally aware of it so much of the time. And to live a life that you really can't regret at the end of any given day or year or at the end of your life, I think it's got to entail succeeding more and more at this choice point of granting your attention to all those things that most merit it. Absolutely. I mean, I think I'd push it even a bit further and say it isn't only about making sure that you only focus on what matters the most to you, but it's almost about accepting that quite a few things that might be among the things that matter the most to you won't make the cut either. Because there's just no reason in our situation to assume that the quantity of things that matter fit comfortably inside the available time. Now, I mean, it's a big responsibility and it's a daunting thought, but I do also think there's something deeply liberating about it. Right. It's the liberation of seeing that something you were trying to do was completely impossible. And given that it was completely impossible, given that there was no hope ever of sort of escaping the terms and conditions of the human situation you don't need to fight that and you can sort of relax into the situation a bit. I think there is something very sort of something that's it sort of stops life. It gets rid of the idea that, like, life is a problem, that there's already a sort of a problem that you've got to solve just through being here. You mentioned meditation briefly in the book, but I forget what your background is with it because it's obviously very informative of how I see this issue. What has been your experience with meditation? I have had a sort of patchy practice for many years. Done a couple of five day, week long or so retreats at the Insight Meditation Society. Oh, nice. Followed a lot of your writing on it and the waking up app. So I'm very, very interested. But I feel slightly sheepish when I get involved in claiming that I'm any kind of active regular meditator, because that would be dishonest. But I do think that a lot of these ideas have touch points with a lot of Buddhist ideas, for sure, in the possibility of relief that you just described. And it comes by acknowledging the endlessness of experience. You're never going to actually accomplish everything, not only everything that you might do, but everything that even upon final analysis, you would think is truly important and truly rewarding. There's an infinite amount of that too, potentially, just like there's a functionally infinite number of good books to read. Once you give up the war here, you just give up hope. You recognize that there's just on some level, more can't be the point, because more is always dwarfed by everything you can't do. And probably more important, everything you do do doesn't really accrue in quite the way that you expect. You look back at all of your past experience now, which is just a memory, and it is by its very nature evanescent. You can't grab hold of it. You can just keep mulling it over by thinking about it. So it never quite lands. And it's not to say that you don't learn things and develop new skills and develop new opportunities for life in the present based on past experience. But the satisfaction of satisfaction doesn't last in quite the way we sense it will by default. And yet we rarely turn the same understanding on the future and recognize that all of these things we are looking forward to or worrying about or somewhere or other focused on, they too are going to have this mirage like quality. When the future finally arrives, it will be this cascade of sights and sounds and sensations and impressions and assumptions, and it will blow through us yet again and very quickly become a memory. So in some sense we need to recognize this different mode of being versus becoming. I mean, it's the becoming side of the equation which is always taken in yet again by the illusion that if we could only check all these boxes in the future, we will be satisfied. Whereas the bean side recognizes that in some basic sense, there is no real place to land beyond recognizing that this moment, with all that has been done and left undone, has to be, in some sense, the ground of our well being. Whatever you have to be being in the very middle of writing the email, you would you really don't feel like writing. The good life requires that you be able to locate some tranquillity and acceptance and even happiness. Even in the midst of that. It can't be predicated on getting it done or just getting through, because then you're just getting through your life, you're getting through your day, and it's just treadmill time. Right. You're so right that we forget this for sort of years and decades at a time, but it's also kind of immediately obvious that if it's all leading up to something, it's all leading up to what? A single moment on your deathbed that makes no sense. It's obvious that it makes no sense. I don't know if I can articulate this properly, but it has something to do with a kind of fundamental misunderstanding or illusion or something about what time is, I suppose. Right. It's this idea that time is a resource. It's a thing that we use, that you have to sort of get the most out of the portion of time that you've been given. All of these things imply a separation between time and you. And yet, as I try to go into in the book a little bit, there's a real sense in which it might make more sense to think of to think of the idea that we are time. Right, that you are a portion of time. And that, to me, speaks to this idea that it's not a dress rehearsal. It has to matter now, if it's ever going to matter. The whole idea that you're sort of using this resource to get to some place of paradise in the future stops making any sense. If you think instead that we just are this portion of time, well, then obviously it's got to be in the present. That meaning is to be found. I attribute some of these ideas in the book to Heidegger, who I sort of grappled with to try to understand this. But since the book was published, I've found, I think, strikingly similar things in some work commentaries on Dogan, the founder of Soto Zen, who seems to have said some very similar things and wrote a essay that the title of which is translated as being time. This idea that we just are time, for me anyway, it almost, at least sometimes triggers this kind of bodily shift into the feeling that it has to matter. Now, I don't know if that makes sense when I put it into you. Yeah, well and Dogan has the virtue of not having joined the Nazi party, right? Exactly. It would have been all things being with him. Yeah, you said you made one point about it can't all be purpose toward getting safely to one's deathbed, you know, with one's priorities intact. And it's this instrumental relationship to everything in life. It is pernicious, actually. You have some reflections on parenting and childhood that make this pretty poignant. Perhaps you can talk about it in light of how we tend to think about our kids as parents and how strange that conception of living life as a means to some nebulous end becomes in that context. Yeah, I mean, I'm not the only person to have made the observation, but it's just the degree to which we think about parenting or naturally fall into thinking about parenting as solely a matter of creating the most successful adults later on for any value of successful. Right. This isn't necessarily a point about money and professional success. It's a point about treating your job as a parent as being the act of creating something in the future to the exclusion of the experience of childhood and the experience of parenthood in the very moment itself. And I quote in the book, I think Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer, calling this the causal catastrophe, the idea that the only question to ask about the quality of a childhood or of a parent child relationship being what it's creating for the future. And as I recall, one of the examples, I think it was him who gave there is a question when it comes to violent video games. Very controversial question, obviously, about whether this leads to sort of bad psychological traits later on in life. But it's kind of only one part of the question. The other question is whether a childhood spent playing violent video games is or is not a good childhood. And it might be. I'm steering well clear of having an opinion on that matter right now. But the point is just that you can ask the question about how the quality of time is spent now, not only about whether it is adding up to certain outcomes. And if you don't at least a little bit focus on what it's like to be on the experience right now, you sort of SAP all the meaning and value from it. I write in the book about still being in this very sort of productivity oriented mindset when our son was first born and finding myself not sufficiently absorbed in the experience of interacting with him because one part of me was trying to figure out whether he was meeting the developmental milestones that I read about in some book. And these things matter. It's that you can't disregard them. But there's a real possibility for that to completely crush the experience itself. And I think it's certainly not just parenthood, but it becomes very parenthood is a sort of a terrain where it seems very easy to fall into it. Yeah, it's a very strange question to pose what is the purpose of a good childhood? Right? Like if the whole point of having a good childhood is to have a good adolescence and the whole point of having a good adolescence is to have a good young adulthood and the whole point of a good young adulthood is to have a good middle age. You see where this is going? Yeah, it might make some sense if we lived forever, but we don't. Exactly what are your thoughts about the occasionally vaunted ideal of having anything like a work life balance? The more I thought about and read about this topic, the less I understood what it meant. So I don't know that I have anything particularly coherent to say. I think the most obvious thing that I do think about it is that this is a sort of classic example in traditional approaches to productivity and time management that looks like what it's offering is calm and peace and a sort of appropriate level of involvement in different domains of life. But really in practice and in the way it gets internalized by people just ups the pressure. It's basically the demand that you have sort of 100% level of appropriate engagement and accomplishment in your work and 100% in your life outside work. And you know that that it ought to be possible to find a way to feel that you're giving all you would like to give to your work and all you would like to give to your family and your social life and your hobbies. And that if you're not managing it sometimes the argument gets said that you're not managing it. Then it is a sort of issue with the societal arrangements and work policies and the rest of it. But usually it's just that it's your fault that you haven't found the right reserves of energy and self discipline to make it work again. The sufficiency problem kicks in, right, this problem that if you get really good at handling any given domain in your life, it will lead to the sense that there is more that you ought to be handling. If you get to the point where you do feel that you have a good work life balance, I think it's virtually inevitable that you'll feel some new pressure to do something else to add another domain in which to excel. So it all it just seemed like a very typical example of that Treadmill phenomenon. Yes, I think we should probably acknowledge that people are in very different places here with respect to a few of these variables. So they're people for whom their work really is just a job because they need to make money to survive. But it's not something that is truly aligned with how they they would want to spend their time if they if they didn't have to work. And then there are those of us who have managed through just sheer good luck to figure out a line of work that is to some significant degree similar or if not identical to what we would want to do even if we didn't have to do anything. And those strike me as fundamentally different circumstances in which to think about how one defends one's work from the rest of one's life and one's life from one's work. For me, I'm definitely among the luckiest here, where what I do for work is what in fact I want to do anyway most of the time. And then it has this strange quality of bleeding into the rest of life because selfishly I'm doing what I want to do a lot, and a lot of that is work. And so there's no real boundary between my work and the rest of life. So the challenge for me is not to be a total workaholic, where my working just competes with family, time and everything else that I also want to give attention to because it really, you know, I'm confronted by you. Know, the zero sum contest between things I genuinely want to do, rather than the burden of work, which, you know, I know I have to do it, but I wish I didn't have to do it, where I have to think. Many people are caught. It's interesting, isn't it? Because it's like there is a similarity between the two situations, much as you're absolutely right. I think that they're very different. They are both kind of confrontations with finitude and the discomfort of finitude. It's obviously a much better problem to have if you're at risk of letting your deeply absorbing job squeeze out time with the family you love than if it's a terrible job that you wish you didn't have to do that's doing that. But I don't know, there is a certain kind of through line between the different situations that I think is I don't know. It's interesting to me. There's obviously a sort of feels like existentialist philosophy or something, but there is a kind of internal shift that I think people do sometimes make when they are doing work that they don't find intrinsically fulfilling. That if they can sort of see the reason why they're doing it in the context of goals that are intrinsically fulfilling, if they can truly believe that it's their best option right now to support the family that they want to support, then there is a level of sort of meaning that gets inculcated just through the choosing. But yeah, I don't know, it's fascinating. The other thing that makes me want to ask you is whether this other phenomenon that one encounters, even if you are lucky enough to spend your work time doing things that you might choose to do otherwise is the phenomenon whereby the fact that it is work, the fact that it is a job threatens to sometimes to erode the satisfaction of it and the fact that you sort of have committed yourself to producing a book manuscript or putting out a regular. Podcast or whatever it might be, starts to threaten to undermine the joy that you would otherwise take in the activity. I don't know if you resonate with that at all. Well, inevitably there is a kind of treadmill effect even in doing what one loves to do the moment it becomes something that has to adhere to any kind of calendar or, you know, so, you know, deadlines or deadlines, even if you like what you're having to do. So there's that. But to an unusual degree now I find myself in the spot of my work, and my guilty pleasures are more and more indistinguishable if you just look at just take this conversation. The reason why we're having it is because I wanted to read your book, and I read it and I loved it, and now we're talking, right? So it's like, had this book been forced on me, which occasionally happens, then it's a slightly different experience. But this really was a book I felt like reading anyway, and now it has become the substance of my, quote, work. But it's really a uniquely privileged spot to be in, to have found a way to do this. But as you point out, it does have this other effect of throwing me up against the limits of all that I want to do and all that I feel I should do. And just the limited bandwidth for all of that. It does make a mockery of this other concept, which used to be pretty well enshrined in our culture among certainly among the most fortunate people. And that's the concept of leisure, right? Something you analyze in the book. We have kind of lost sight of leisure and the whole point of it, even the most fortunate people have, especially when you look at how the rich, certainly among the rich, knowledge workers, if you look at how they spend their time, these are not people who are especially good at downtime. You have people working, as measured by the clock, more hours than anyone else in society. On some level, they're choosing to work this hard. And not all of them are in precisely my spot of doing almost entirely things they want to do anyway. But in most cases, presumably, they're free to do less work and they're not accomplishing it. And leisure has become this. It's something that we feel that we either need to justify or we just fail to even try to justify it. Whereas in previous generations, that kind of inversion of priorities would be unthinkable. I mean, the point of being rich and lucky in generations past was so that you could enjoy leisure, right? Yeah. And it's such a strange I'm thinking about what the causes of that are. It's such a strange mixture of, I think, economic forces sort of glomming on to this inbuilt tendency that we have to want to be unlimited to want to get to the very end of workload that we're brought and all the technological reasons that that workload has become ever more functionally infinite, so that there's no possibility of getting to the end of it. And then the way that that becomes like a status symbol. It's kind of embarrassing on some level to seem to have leisure and to be very busy is I'm not saying anything original here, but to be busy is a sign that you must be in demand and that you must be living your life in a useful fashion. And then, as well, you get this very strange phenomenon where leisure itself becomes subject to the instrumental imperative, where it doesn't really count as a good use of your time off if you're not at least building some skill. Or resting and engaging in, quote, self care so that you can be a better worker or more productive in your job or at least meeting your fitness goals or something. Right. There's something very counter to the spirit of the times in just sort of tinkering around with some hobby because you sort of enjoy doing it and not particularly caring with you whether you even get better at it or manage to turn it into an income stream or something. There's one version of multitasking around which I'm I think unabashedly positive. Now, this is going to sound self serving because it's speaking directly to what is increasingly my career here. But you know, listening to audio, listening to podcasts, listening to audiobooks while doing something else that would otherwise be merely instrumental has changed. I think many people's relationship to whatever it is, the long commute, the doing of the dishes, just doing something which is inevitable, but not the point of one's day when you're listening to a podcast or to a book or something that really is adding value to what you're doing with your mind. That strikes me more and more as an unalloyed good. I mean, it's made me, by default, patient with a drive that takes a half hour longer than planned for, right. The sense of rushing, provided there's no real urgency out there in the world, has just completely evaporated for me because I'm now virtually always listening to something that I really do want to listen to. And I don't know if you've experienced the same thing in your life and or if you see any unhappy little caveat to add to that that rosy picture I just painted. No, I totally know what you mean. I mean, this is a I defer to you on this, but there's a neuroscientific point about different channels of attention here, I think, David, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with 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@samharris.org. You./n

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+Today I am presenting the audio from the event I did in Denver with Robin Hansen. Robin's professor of Economics at George Mason University, diversity and he's the author with Kevin similar of a very interesting book titled The Elephant in the Brain hidden Motives in Everyday Life. I give more of his bio from the stage, but I really enjoyed this conversation with Robin. We spoke about all the related issues here of selfishness and hypocrisy and norms and norm violations, cheating, deception, self deception, the evolutionary logic of conversation, social status signaling and countersignaling, common knowledge. There's many interesting topics here. I enjoyed the event. Unfortunately the audio is a little wonky. We are completely at the mercy of whatever recording we get from these venues and there are a few moments where things cut out. It's a little echoey, it's not that bad. Once you start listening, you will acclimate to it. But it was a good conversation. And so now I bring you Robin Hanson. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam Harris. Thank you all. Well, thank you all for coming out. Really, it's it's amazing to see you all or see some fraction of you. I'm going to jump right into this. We have a very interesting conversation ahead of us because I have a great guest. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He's also a research associate with the Future of Humanity Institute, which you might know focuses on existential risk and other big topics of ethical importance. He has a PhD in Social Science from Caltech, a master's in Physics and the philosophy of science. He did nine years of research with Lockheed and NASA studying mostly artificial intelligence and also Bayesian statistics. And he's recognized for his contributions in economics and especially in prediction markets, but he's made contributions in many other fields. And he has written a fascinating book which unfortunately is not for sale here today. But you should all buy this book because it's amazingly accessible and he just touches so many interesting topics. That book is the elephant in the brain. Hidden motives in everyday life. Please welcome Robin Hanson. Thanks for coming. We're here. So your reputation for being interesting precedes you. I deny it all. So there are many things we can talk about and as you know but I want to focus on your book and I want to move in kind of a linear ways of your book because your book is so rich and I don't think we will do the book justice, but we will try. The book is really kind of a sustained meditation on selfishness and hypocrisy. We have these ideas about why we do things and then we have all of the evidence accruing for the real reasons why we do these things and the mismatch there is rather harrowing to consider and your book is just an unvarnished look at that. So I want to tour through this, but perhaps before we get to some of these specific topics. How do you view the project of your book? What were you up to in writing? I should say that you have a co author on the book, Kevin Similar, who's not here tonight. But what were you doing writing this book? This was what I wish I would have known. When I started my social science career many years ago, I started out in physics and then went into computer science. And in those areas, I noticed that people were really eager for innovation. And then I seemed to see that in social science there were even bigger innovations possible. And so I moved there. And then I was puzzled to find that people were not very interested in innovations compared to the other areas. And I kept also finding other puzzles in social science ways in which our usual theories don't make sense of what's going on. And our book is an attempt to explain a lot of the major puzzles in social science and the lack of interest in innovation. And one of the conclusions is that we're just doing policy wrong, policy analysis wrong. But first we have to get into the basics here. There's really two levels of it. There's how you as a person might think about these things, but it's the level of personal hypocrisy and then the mismatch between what your motives actually are and what you may think they are. And then there's the fact that institutions have this kind of structure or this blindness where the institutions think they're about something and they seem not to be, upon analysis, an institution like medicine or a university. So what's the basic problem? Why is there this mismatch between what we think we're doing and what we're actually doing? So if you've read many psychology books, you're familiar with the idea that people are not always honest about what they're doing and why. And you might find that fright and kind of boring by now because, of course we all know that. But so far, people haven't taken that insight to our major social institutions, and that's what we think is new and original about our book. We say that not only are you not always honest about whether you like to go to the opera with your spouse or whether you enjoy playing and cleaning up after your kids, you're also not honest with yourself about why you go to school and why do you go to the doctor and why you vote and why you do art. That is, these deviation between what we think we're doing and our actual motives infect many major social institutions, and they therefore, you know, should make us reconsider the basics of what these institutions are for and therefore why we support them and whether we should subsidize them and how we should structure them and everything. Right. So unlike many conversations I have here, I have a list of nouns that I just kind of a ladder through which we could walk. Let's start with norms and what you call meta norms. What is a norm, and why do we have them? And what does it mean to protect them or to fail to protect them? So animals like chimpanzees and most other social animals, they have a complicated social world, and they pay attention to each other, and they reward others for helping them and punish others if they hurt them. So they have many regular behaviors. But humans uniquely have norms in the sense that we have a rule of what you're supposed to do or not supposed to do. And if somebody else sees you breaking the norm, it's a rule that they're supposed to do something about it. They're supposed to tell other people that you've broken a norm and then try to find a way to make you stop breaking the norms. And so humans have these norms about what we're supposed to do, we're not supposed to do. And many of these norms are quite common around the world. We're supposed to help each other. We're supposed to not brag, not be violent to each other. We're supposed to make group decisions together by consensus. And we're not even supposed to have subgroup coalitions, people who are aligning against the others. These are just common human norms. And many of these norms are expressed in terms of motives. So there's a rule that we're not supposed to hit each other on purpose. It's okay to hit accidentally, but not on purpose. And so because our ancestors had these norms and they were so important, their social world was their main world. We developed these big brains that we have mainly apparently for social reasons. We balanced these big brains to deal with our social world, and we have the biggest brains of all. So our social world must have been the most complicated. But norms were a big part of this world. And so we have this part of our brain, this all the time thinking about what we're doing and trying to explain why we're following good motives that's, in a sense, the conscious part of your mind you are the conscious part of your mind, and you aren't necessarily the one in charge of your mind. There's this idea that instead of, say, being the president or the king, you're the press secretary, you don't actually know why you do things, but you're supposed to make up a good excuse, and you do that. You're constantly looking at what you're doing and asking yourself, what would be a good explanation for this thing I'm doing? And you're good at that. You're good at coming up with excuses for what you're doing, but you don't actually know what you're actually doing. You don't realize that you don't know. Yeah. And this is a very robust but not really celebrated neurological finding, and it becomes horribly elaborated. And people who have what's called a split brain procedure, where as a remedy for grandma seizures. You can cut the corpus colossalum which connects the two hemispheres of the brain and that prevents the seizure activity from moving from one hemisphere to the other. And what people have found going back now many decades is that most people, the left linguistically agile hemisphere confabulates reasons for doing things. When those reasons are brought out in an experimental paradigm, those reasons are just manifestly not so. So you can present the right hemisphere of the brain with a demand like get up and walk toward the door. And then you can ask the linguistically competent left hemisphere why are you walking toward the door? And it will confabulate a reason. I want to get a Coke. This is a result from a classic experiment which I think you cite in your book. These experiments were done by Roger Sperry and Michael Kazanaga and Aron Zadel. And the left hemisphere just continually completes the picture linguistically without any apparent awareness that those claims are out of register. They're based on nothing. This is what the word confabulate means just to just make up this reason out of full cloth. And it seems that though most of us have not had our brain split, we have an ability to give a post talk rationalization for why we did things, which is certainly an experimental paradigm can be shown to really have no relationship to the proximate cause of our actions. And it is embarrassing if caught on video. So we're living with this fact that we are our own press secretary giving the at minimum the most benign but often just the most grandiose and apparently noble rationale for why we're doing what we're doing. And yet evolution and and other modes of logic suggests that that isn't the reason for why we do much of what we do well. So that you are in the habit of just making up excuses. That means you could be wrong a lot but doesn't mean you are wrong a lot. Maybe you are mostly right even though you would be wrong if you didn't know. So we have to go further than just the possibility you're being wrong to decide you're wrong. So we have to wonder, well, how sure can you be about most of your activity, whether it's the real reason you have? Now, one thing to be clear about is almost any area of life like going to school or going to the doctor is big and complicated. The world's complicated. So a great many motives are relevant. And if we average over people, surely thousands of different motives irrelevant for almost everything we're doing. And so what we have to be asking here is what is the main motive? What's the most dominant motive? Not what's the only motive. Just as an example, if you say the dog ate my homework as an excuse, that only works because sometimes dogs eat homework. If dogs didn't exist, it wouldn't make much sense. Dragon ate my homework doesn't work. So these things that we come up with as excuses for our behavior, they only work as excuses because sometimes they're true. They have an element of truth. So we're not going to say that your usual motive isn't at all applicable. The claim is just it's not as true as you think. And you're not saying that no one has noble motive. Exactly. So there is real altruism, there's real no all of these things. Exactly. Sometimes people get up to get a Coke. Yes. But in addition, there are evolutionary reasons why we would be self deceived about our motives. We are actually, and this is based often on the work of Robert Trivers, who's done a lot of work on self deception and the evolutionary logic there. We are better at deceiving others. We're better at getting away with norm violations if we in fact are not aware that our press secretary is not telling the truth. Which is to say that if we in fact are self deceived, we are better deceivers. So if we want to lie, it's better not to know we're lying because then it seems sincere, right? Well, you can be sincere, right? The easy way to seem sincere is to be sincere, even if you're wrong. Famous Seinfeld episode I believe you're not lying if you believe it. I should say that basically this is something you and I should probably talk about, but the jury is out as to whether or not knowing any of what we're about to talk about is good for you. So this sorry, there's a psychological experiment being performed on you and you have not consented memory white pills will be available after the session. How do you think about let's take cheating as cheating is a classic norm violation. There's reason to think that our brains have evolved in large measure both to cheat and to detect cheating and others. How do you think about cheating in your line of work? Well, cheating is, again, violating norms and so we want to live in a community where the norms are enforced and we also want ourselves to be exceptions to rules. So, for example, most criminals actually think crime is a bad thing. They just think that their particular acts don't quite count as crimes. So we all basically would like to make exceptions for ourselves. So the question is how? And one of the ways we can do it is to not be very honest about what we're doing with ourselves. This may not be relevant, but it just put me in the mind of it. I've never understood why no one remarks on the fact that when we think of it like just reducing our speed limit laws, what that would do in terms of saving lives. And we could save tens of thousands of lives a year. But if we made cars that could not exceed the speed limit, that would guarantee that no one would exceed the speed limit. But no one would want that. No one who thinks that we should have speed limits would want a car that it would slavishly follow the speed limit. Is that just synonymous with wanting the right to cheat on the speed limits? Are we all imagining some emergency where you have to speed past the speed limit? So the whole theme here is that in your head you think you want things. So in your head you think you want to enforce speed limits with your actual actions. You don't. You want to speed and there's a contradiction there and you don't want to look at that contradiction. So you look away and that's the elephant in your brain. As you know, the elephant in the room is the thing we all know is there that you don't want to look at. And the elephant in your brain is this contradiction between what you say you want and what you actually do. Let's actually raise this issue now, whether this line of thinking or this analysis has a downside. So if, in fact, it's true that we are better fit to our social environment with a certain amount of ignorance with respect to our own motive, so that it's optimal there's, like, an attractor of optimal fitness which entails some measure of self deception, and we are in the process of you in the process of writing this book. All of us, in the process of talking about it, are to some degree undeceiving ourselves about these things. Why isn't that bad for us? And is it worth worrying whether it's bad for us? So apparently evolution constructed you to be ignorant about why you do things. It thought, yes, it might be useful if you know why you do things. But that's to be traded off against all these other benefits of not knowing why you do things. So you were constructed not to know if the situation you're in in the modern world is much like the situation evolution anticipated for you. That's probably better in your personal interest not knowing. You are probably better off going on with the usual sort of ignorance that the rest of us have had and acting that way because you'll get along that way and that's what evolution anticipated for you. Now, evolution couldn't think of everything. So you could be in an environment today which is not something evolution might have participated, or you might be in an unusual situation. For example, you might be a salesperson or a manager, the sort of person for whom it's really important to understand people's motives and to be able to read them and understand what's going on. You also might be a nerd, like myself. That is, most people could just intuitively read the social world around them and do the right thing. Some of us can't. And some of us need more conscious analysis in the world to figure out what's going on. And so you may appreciate this more cynical conscious analysis, even if it has the disadvantages. But most importantly, as a self help seminar, I think that's not going to sell a lot of tickets. Not that you'd be nerds or anything, but some of us are. But I also just think if you're going to be a specialist in policy analysis, if you're going to stand up and say I have studied education or medicine and I have thought about what changes would be better, it's more your responsibility to know what's actually going on in those worlds. Even if it costs you some degree of social awkwardness to know that I think at least social analysts and policy analysts should understand these things. Let's take an institutional example. Take education. What is it that we're deceived about with respect to education? Again, just to be clear, just because you might be deceived about many things doesn't mean you are. So I need to walk you through arguments to convince you that in fact in each area your motives isn't what you think it is. Now, my colleague, beloved colleague Ryan Kaplan has a book just out called The Case Against Education and he goes through a whole book like treatment of this. Our chapter is just a summary of that, but a summary is sufficient. A summary is when you ask people why do you go to school? If they are answering in front of a public speech or in a letter of application, say they will tell you the usual story is to learn the material so that you can become a more useful person later. That's our standard story about school and there are a number of puzzles in education that just don't make sense of that theory and I'm going to offer another theory that makes more sense of it. Some of these puzzles are you don't actually learn very much at school. Most of the stuff you learn isn't very useful. Yet people who don't learn useful things are paid more. So bartenders who go to college make more than bartenders who go to high school. You do make more for more years of school in terms of your wages. But the last year of high school and the last year of college is worth as much as the other three years combined. But you don't learn more in the last year of high school or college. I went to Stanford for a while for free without registering or applying, simply by walking in and sitting on classes. One of the professors gave me a letter recommendation based on my performance. Nobody tries to stop you from doing that. Why? You can get the very best education for free if you don't want a credential that calls into question the idea that you're there for the learning as opposed to something else. So the alternative theory is that you're there to show off and to gain a credential that shows that you are worthy of showing off. That is, you are smart conscientious informants. You're willing to do the sorts of things that they ask you to do. You take ambiguous instructions with long deadlines and consistently over several decades, over several years complete mildly boring assignments, great preparation for future workplaces and by the end you have shown that and that's something employers value and that's a standard plausible explanation for education. Most of you will find that it plausible unless you are an education policy expert which case you will be offended and search for another explanation. So in most of these areas most of you will not and say yeah, that makes sense unless this is your precious area. For all of us there is something precious in our lives, something sacred. And for that we will be more reluctant to accept one of these more cynical explanations of what's going on there. But as long as education isn't sacred for you, you'll probably not. And say yeah, you don't learn much in a school but so now what is signal and what is noise? There are employers wrong to value those things. What should people do differently as a result of understanding this about individually? You shouldn't do different if individually, if you want to convince an employer in our world that you have what it takes, you do need to go to school, jump through the hoops and perform well. And in fact you might do that better if you aren't aware that you're just doing arbitrary things to show off to an employer that may be demotivating for you. You might be better off pretending to yourself and believing that you're learning usefulness. But the point is you are showing that you have a characteristic, not creating a characteristic. The school isn't changing you, it's distinguishing you. It's like certifying you as different. So now what's the role of common knowledge in some of these situations you should define what common knowledge is, right? It's not common knowledge what common knowledge is. So think about cheat. He asked about cheating. And think of the rule that you're not supposed to drink alcohol in public. This is a rule and there are people who are supposed to enforce this rule, the police. And you might think this of course is relatively easy to enforce. But think of the example of people putting an alcoholic beverage inside a paper bag and drinking it outside. This happens. Now ask yourself how hard could it be for the police to know that you're drinking alcohol if you're drinking some bottle of a paper bag? Outsource of course they know but you're giving them an excuse to look the other way. That is, it's not common knowledge. We don't know that. We all know that. We all know that it's alcohol. Somebody could be fooled and that's enough to pretend that you don't know. So this is why it's actually much easier to cheat in many ways than you might have thought. We have all these rules and we're supposed to enforce them. But we're not very eager to enforce them. We'd rather go about our business and ignore the rule violations. And so a rule violation needs to be kind of blatant and other people need to see us see the rule violation and then we kind of feel forced to do something about it. But if it's not blatant, it's not something we all can see and know that we know, then you might prefer to pretend you didn't see. And many of you probably have seen things that are not supposed to happen as you walk by the street and you just keep walking, hoping that nobody saw you saw it, because then you could pretend you didn't see it and go about your business, because it would be a pain and trouble to stop and try to enforce the rules. Yeah, well, also, there's so much about our social lives where we know there's a subtext to what's going on. But if that subtext ever became explicit, it would destroy the basis of trust or good feeling. Or like if you said to someone I'm only inviting you over to dinner tonight because you invited me last time and I needed to reciprocate. Exactly. That's why we're having this dinner on some level that we all know that's going on. But to make it explicit is sort of antithetical to being friends with people, right? So there are often many levels of what's going on. And, in fact, we expect to see that in movies and stories. So if somebody as an actor was given a script and the script said you're at a romantic dinner with somebody else and the two of you are there talking to each other and what you're saying to each other is I love you. I love you too. This is great. We're having a wonderful relationship. This is a wonderful restaurant. Isn't this a great night? The actor will tell you, I can't act. That because there's just one level there and that doesn't seem plausible at all. We expect, and it seemed like that there to be multiple levels that is, there's the surface level of I love you. Isn't this great? And something else wants to be going on and the actor will actually look for another level so they can act to see I'm afraid you'll leave me, so I'm trying to make sure you don't. Or I'm thinking of leaving you, and so I'm trying to let you off night. Something to make there be two levels of motives because that's what we expect to see out of actors and scenes. So we are really, at some level, we kind of know that people are quite often pretending one motive and really acting another motive. It's one thing that one chapter in your book on conversation which I found fascinating because conversation is fairly mysterious in terms of the mismatch between what we think, what is going on and what is actually going on. And why it would be valued in an evolutionary sense. So let's talk about what most people think is going on during a conversation and what seems to actually be going on. So we're going muddy here because of course this is the conversation and we will try to pretend that this isn't true about our conversation because that's the truth. The jig is up. Exactly. So the usual story if you ask why are you talking to your friend? Why did you spend an hour talking? Why didn't you do the dishes? Or something useful? You might say, well we're exchanging information. We each have information the other person doesn't. And by talking and exchanging information we can all know more. And this is the standard rationale for most of our conversations. What I'm about to tell you applies not just to personal conversation but also applies to our news media conversations, to academic conversations and journalists and all of them. The standard rationale is information. That's why you read the newspaper of course, right? To get more information. Now there are many features of our conversations that don't fit very well with this explanation that's again my main argument here is to show you the detailed puzzles that don't fit with the explanation, then offer you another explanation that fits better. So some of the puzzles here are if it was about exchanging information, we would keep track of debts. I might say, well I've told you three useful things so far. You haven't told me any useful thing. It's your turn. We would be more eager to listen than to talk. It would be our turn to talk. And then sigh, okay, I'll find I'll tell you something, we would be searching for the most valuable things to tell each other, the things that matter most to each other. And we would talk about important things instead of the trivialities that we usually fill our conversations with. And it would be fine to jump from topic to topic as long as we were saying something valuable and important because the point is the correct to communicate information. But as you know, the usual norm of conversation is to slowly drift from topic to topic, none of which need to be very important, but each time we should say something relevant to that topic. Now, an alternative explanation in sharing information for this theory is that we are showing off our backpack of tools and resources that we can show, we can bring to bear to any topic you dare to offer. So it's important that the conversation meander in a way no one of us can control. So that we are each challenged to come up with something relevant to whatever that is and by impressing you with knowing something, having a friend or a resource, having a tip, having some experience that's relevant to whatever you bring up. I show you that if you and I stay allies and associates in the future, whatever problems you have. I'll have something relevant I'm ready for you with resources that would be useful to you because look what I can do no matter what conversation topic comes up. Well, the mismatch between desire to listen and desire to talk is pretty I think that's the one that people will find very salient because if it was really about just getting information we would be massively biased toward listening. We would be stingy with we would be pricing out all of our disclosures. We'd have much bigger ears and smaller mouths. Then how do you think about gossip and reputation management and what's happening in that space? We do in fact exchange information. So again it works as an excuse because it's partly true. We do exchange information and it is somewhat valuable. It's just not the main thing we're doing. But often well, the information we're exchanging is meta to the actual apparent topic as you may know indirectly through what people say. They tell you other things like bragging about themselves indirectly by telling you about their great vacation in some expensive prepare place. And they talk about each other often in the guise of saying what's been happening. But we are very interested in knowing about each other and evaluating each other. And so part of what's going on when we're impressing people is not only impressing the people who immediately see us we're impressing the other people who will hear about it indirectly. And so it's important that we impress other people in ways that can transfer through that gossip to the other people who will hear about it. And we are trying to avoid negative gossip or negative reputation of things that would look make us look bad. And this is you know, a basic explanation for why a lot of decisions in the world are really quite shallow. So so for example as an employer you might look at an employee and say this this potential employee is looks really good. Yes, they don't have a college degree but they don't need a college degree for this. And I can tell they could do the job but then you might think to yourself say yes but other people will hear that I hired this person and they will notice that this person doesn't have a college degree and they will gossip about it. And then I might look bad for having hired someone with a college degree and maybe I just don't want to take that chance. So even if I know that this person could do the job I still because I'm trying to impress this wider audience who will gossip about it. I am pushed to make shallower choices based on less than I know. Is there anything that you do differently in this area based on having thought about this? Do you view gossip as a negative character trait that should be discouraged in yourself or do you or do you just see it as inevitable or socially useful as a way of correcting misaligned reputation. I understand and appreciate gossip has an important human role as a natural nerd. I'm not as inclined they're interested in it personally, but that's my failing, not the world. So is social status the main metric to which all of this is pegged? Is that what we're concerned about as subtext virtually all the time? It's one of the things, but it's actually less than people might think. So if you're forced to admit you're showing off, often the thing you want to admit to showing off is how great you are. That is, how smart or conscientious or careful, how knowledgeable, but plausibly. At least half of what you're doing in showing off is showing off loyalty, not ability. And so perhaps we push medicine on it to show that we care about people. We participate in politics to show that we're loyal to our side. We do a lot of things to show loyalty and that is not something we're as eager to admit because of course, by trying to be loyal, we are showing some degree of submission to those we are trying to. Yeah. So that is a somewhat craven motive to sign on to. I'm being loyal. Right? But why is that? In fact, loyalty is a virtue that we humans actually have two different kinds of status, and it's suspicious and noticeable that we don't make the distinction very often and we merge them together. There's dominance and prestige. Dominance is more having power over someone and prestige is earning respect. And the difference of these actually show up in where your eyes go and how you look. When somebody has dominance over them, you are not supposed to look them in the eye. Looking them in the eyes shows defines when somebody has proceeds. You are supposed to look at them, presumably up here, you are looking at us. We are claiming we have prestige and you're not supposed to look away at it. I wish you wouldn't put it that way. Yes. Well, how embarrassing. And so people want to get prestige and they don't want to admit to accepting dominance or submitting dominance. But of course we do. People admit to wanting prestige more. So they might admit to accepting prestige, although not to seeking it, of course. Now, in ancient history, most societies had kings and their neighbors had tyrants. Tyrants dominated because they bad guys over there had dominance and those people were submitting the dominance and what a terrible thing they had to suffer. But we have a king who has prestige and it's okay for us to look up to and obey our king because he's worthy of the status. And so this is often how people come to terms with their bosses. So from a distance, people say how terrible it is that we all obey our bosses at work, but each of us at work often makes peace with that by saying, well, my boss is okay. He's earned that right, to be in that role. And I'm okay with doing what he says, right? So now, I don't want to spend a lot of time on politics, but obviously everything you've written about is relevant to politics. And as I was reading the book, it seems somewhat mysterious to me that in the current moment, someone like Trump seems to violate more or less every rule you mention in your book. I mean, the things we've evolved not to do or not to do brazenly like brag or lie without any hope of being believed or advertise our most crass motives in place of more noble ones that could have been plausible, right? Yeah, right. He seems to get away with all of this. So how do you explain the success of what's essentially the antievolutionary algorithm? Sure. So let's start with something called counter signaling. So, ordinarily if you have an acquaintance and you are trying to show that you like an acquaintance, you will do things like smiling at them, being polite, flattering them, opening the door for them, offering them some food. Those are ways we ordinarily show someone that we are trying to be friendly. When you have really close friends, however often you go out of your way to do the opposite. You insult them, you trip them, you don't show up for some meeting. Why do you do the opposite for a close friend? So that's in part to show that you are more than an acquaintance. Once it's clear that you are at least an acquaintance, people might wonder, how close are we? And doing the opposite can show that you are more than an acquaintance. A paper that discussed this was called Toothpool for School. As you know, many students try to show how studious, how good they are at school by studying hard and doing well. And then some students try to show that they can ace everything without trying. And that's, again, counter signaling. So he's managed to convince half the country that he is their best friend by revealing all of these. But remember, politics is about loyalty signaling. And at one level, we might all want politicians who are high status. We might all want politicians who are articulate and tall and went to a good school and smart and say all the right polite things and have stamina, et cetera. And so in general, we would all want the same thing there. But if you want to show that your side is different and you are being especially loyal to your side, you may have to go against the norm. So, as you may know, when the election of Trump, there was a subset of our society who felt neglected, who felt that their voice was not being heard and that the politician establishment was not catering to them. And so Trump stood up and said, I will cater to you. And he went out of his way to show loyalty to that group by countersignaling, in many ways by doing the opposite of what an ordinary politician might do to appeal to everyone, to show I really am appealing to you and you in particular. And I'm going out of my way to raise the cost of appealing to other people, to appeal more to you, to show that I really am loyal to you. He did convince that group that he was unusually loyal to them, and they voted for him on that basis, and he has successfully countersignaled his way into the presidency. The rest of the world and other people are saying, but this is not the usual leader. And of course, the people who voted for him said, yes, that's exactly how I knew he was trustworthy. On my side is that he countersignaled the usual signals of overall political competence. But we often do that to signal loyalty. We often go out of our way to pay costs to signal loyalty. So one of our chapters is on religion, a topic that I know my guest host up here has written a lot about. And one of the standard stories about religion is you may agree to unusual rituals and to believe strange things in order to convince people that the people you share those rituals and strange beliefs with, that you are tied to them and that it will be expensive for you to leave them and that they think they're therefore reliably. Actually viewing back at Trump just for a second. Viewing a lot of this through the lens of loyalty explains a few other things. Because when you look at how people in his inner circle or people who have to function like his press secretary, try to make the with as brave a faith as possible, try to put some positive construal on his line or his mistakes or his misrepresentations of fact, that does function as a kind of loyalty test. I mean, whenever you are just when people with real reputations have to get out there and, you know, put both feet in their mouths so as to pretend that the President didn't do likewise, it looks like a bizarre hazing ritual from here, but it does signal loyalty. But again, those people across the border, they have tyrants and we have kings. It's easy to criticize the other side for being excessively loyal and submissive, but this happens all across the political spectrum. It's not just on the Trump side. Yeah, I don't know what that yeah meant. I wasn't accepting that at all. That was confabulation, in case you were wondering. So, Daniel, you're an economist by day. Let's spend a few minutes on incentives. Because it seems to me that many of the problems in our lives are the result not of bad people doing bad things because they're bad, but all of us good people or more or less good people struggling to function in systems where the incentives are not aligned so as to get us to do the right thing most of the time or make it easy enough to do the right thing. I think you have a line in your book about incentives being like the wind. You can decide to row into it or you can tack against it, but it's better to have the wind at your back. How do you think about incentives? And what's the low hanging fruit here? What is it that we could be doing differently in any area of consequence? So our book is about motives and money and power and respect are things we have as motives. And incentives are often aligned with those things. So we often do the things that give us more of these things. We want, but we'd rather not admit that those are our highest priorities. And so we're usually reluctant to overtly. Just do what it takes to get the money or respect. So in most areas of life, we have to put some sort of gloss of some higher motive that we have to pretend we're trying to do and that means often very direct, simple incentive games don't work. They are too obvious. Just like your incentive to reciprocate the dinner. That's an incentive you have, but you have also an incentive to not admit that too directly, because otherwise you would force them to admit that they mainly wanted the reciprocation. And so this is an issue with incentives that many of the problems we have in the world happen because we have insufficient incentives to do the right thing. But often that's because we don't want to admit how important incentives are. So we don't want to admit that we need incentives so we don't restructure things to produce the incentives because we want to pretend that we don't need the incentives. So, for example, your doctor's incentive to give you the best treatment can often be compromised by the fact that under one incentive system just want to treat you more just because they get paid every time they treat you, or another incentive system might be to treat you less because they have to pay out of. Their pocket every time they treat you under. Either case, their incentives might not be well aligned with you, but you could have set up some sort of more direct incentive system where they had a stake in your health. But you might not be comfortable with asking for that, because that might show that you didn't trust your doctor. You might rather, on the surface, pretend like you trust your doctor and they trust you. And you have a nice, comfortable relationship. This is also a problem in financial investment, actually. An awful lot of people invest an awful lot in intermediaries who take a lot of money but don't offer that much in return. And people often just like the relationship they have with the intermediary. And they don't want a distrusting relationship that would have some explicit, stronger financial incentives. So they accept a weak relationship. People often want to feel like you had a relationship and that relationship is degraded by the idea that you might not have trusted them. I'm a researcher in academia and most money comes in the form of grants where they say, apply for the grant and then they might give you the grant. We've long known that prizes are often more effective prizes where they say, if you do the following thing, then we'll give you this much money. And a prize can give stronger incentives for people to do things, but a prize is less trusting and you, as the granting agency, often want to just form a relationship with someone and then take credit for them as if we were buddies. And the prize sort of makes an arms like distance where clearly I don't trust you if I'm going to only pay you if you do this measurable thing. And so we'd rather have this closer relationship than to have a stronger incentive. Is there a meta level to many of these considerations where it can be reasonable to not follow the purely rational line through all of these problems? It sounds like what would happen is if we took all of this to heart, we would try to bootstrap ourselves to some new norms that paid better dividends, that seem more rational, economically or otherwise in terms of health outcomes. And yet, given human nature, we might find the price of anchoring ourselves to those new norms to be unacceptable for one reason or another. So the way I would summarize this is to say our usual institutions let us pretend to be trying to get the thing we pretend to want while actually under the surface giving us the things we actually want. Policy analysts typically try to analyze how to give policy reforms that would give us more of the things we pretend to want. And we're usually uninterested in that because we know we don't actually want more of the things we pretend we want. If you could design a policy reform that let us continue to pretend to get the things we pretend to want while actually getting more of what we actually want, we'd like that, but we can't admit it. If we stumble into it, we'll stay there. But if the policy healthy analysts were just to out loud say, well, this is a system that will give you more of this thing is what you actually want, but admit it, don't you? We don't want to admit it and then we want one to embrace that. So yes, what we want to do is pay for the appearance of the thing we're pretending to want and we're often paying a lot for that appearance. I would love to see a transcript of what you've just said there. So I'm going to ask you some rapid fire kind of bonus questions here. I want to leave a lot of time for Q and A because though conversation isn't about just exchanging information. You have a lot of information to exchange and I want to get the audience involved. But if you had one piece of advice for a person who wanted to succeed in your area of work what would that be? I am an intellectual and my measure of success would be insight. There are other measures of success. You can have a prestigious position, you could make a lot of money, you could get a lot of friends. But if the measure of success is insight, then a number of strategies, one of which is just to look for neglected areas. So as we talked about in conversation, there's a strong norm in ordinary conversation to follow the conversation, to talk about what everybody else is talking about. And academics do that, news media does that and we do that in ordinary conversations in a group of people. But for intellectual contributions, if you jump right in on what everybody else is talking about your chances of making a large impact are pretty small. You're adding a small amount to what everybody else is talking about. If you go talk about what somebody else isn't talking about, find something important but neglected, your contribution can be quite large even if you're not especially brilliant or well tooled. And so one very simple heuristic, if you want to produce intellectual insight is just to look at what other people aren't looking at that seems important and hope that later on they'll come around to your topic and realize that you did make a contribution. But how long would you stay in that important area waiting for people to come around? You don't have to stay. You have to stay long enough to make a contribution and then you can go off looking for another area to make a contribution to. What, if anything, do you wish you had done differently in your twenty s, thirty s or forty s? You can pick the relevant decade. Well, I wandered around a bit much like Sam in that I started my PhD program at the age of 34 with two kids aged zero and two. It's a relatively late start. That was in some sense the price for continuing to switch because other areas seem to be actually be more objectively important and to have more promise. But as I said before, this book that I'm out with here is summarizing the thing I wish I would have known at the beginning of that social science career, which is that we are just often not honest with ourselves about our motives. So the thing I'm most known for actually is something called prediction markets, betting markets on important topics. And they do work well and they give people something they say they want, which is more accurate estimates and information on important topics. And it turns out people are usually not very interested in them even though you can show over and over again in many ways that they work and they're cheap, et cetera. Part of why I didn't realize that that would happen is I took people afterward for what they want. So you wish you hadn't spent so much time on prediction? Well, I wish I would have understood the constraint that people are not honest about what they want, and thought about that constraint when I was initially trying to design institutions. So I read many other ideas and worked on ideas for reforming politics and medical purchasing and information aggregation, et cetera. And in each case I assumed the usual story about what we're trying to do and worked out a better answer. And we actually can not only work out better answers, we can show them. And not only in math, but in lab experiments and field experiments. We do actually know many ways to make the world better substantially. And the world's not interested, most of them because we know how to make the world better according to the thing that people say. They want to learn more at school, to get healthier at the hospitals, to get more policy in politics, but in fact, emotionally, at people's heart, they kind of know that's not what they want and so they're not interested. So I wish I would have known that 20 years ago. And this book is hopefully to somebody at a younger career, somebody can pick this up. You might know a 20 year old who has been saying for a while, everybody's bullshitting, nobody's telling the truth. Where can I find out what's really going on? I'm hoping our book could be that book. So ten years from now, what do you think you'll regret doing too much of or too little of at this point in your life? I mean, if I knew that, I would presumably be doing something different. Do you actually think that's true? Isn't that just one of the problems? That, for instance, you know, you want to lose weight, you know how to lose weight, but you still can't get the things? If I'm neglecting the long run for the short run, right? I don't know if I am, but yes, if I am neglecting the long run, then I would regret not investing more in the long run. But I am primarily investing in this long run effort to produce intellectual insight. And I actually think there are scale economies in that. So the more fields you learn, the more mental models and tools you have is to learn new fields so you can actually learn new fields faster, more fields you have. So if your intellectual project is to learn many fields and then find ways to combine the insights from them together, that's something you continue to do more and better as you get older. And so I'm enjoying that wave, and I'm not thinking I'm over at all. What negative experience, one that you would not wish to repeat, has been most valuable to you, most valuable to be negative or changed you for the better, but it's got to be negative. You wouldn't want to repeat it. Well, so early in my academic career, I sort of really just failed to do the simple standard thing of applying to the best colleges. I'm not sure what went wrong, but somehow my family or me somehow just did not go through the process of applying to good colleges far away. We just sent me to the local college, which was easy for me, okay, too easy compared to my colleagues. So I had lots of free time. So perhaps I might have thought I should have gone to a more challenging college and then people would have challenged me. But that made me who I am in the sense that with all that free time, I just started studying stuff on my own. I sort of made up my own topics and made up my own questions and just started going in and working on things. And so actually, I was a physics undergraduate major, and the first two years of physics classes are going over all the major topics, and then the last two years are going off over all the major topic is again with more math. And I had all these questions that the math was not answering. And so what I did in the last two years of college was to just play with the equations, just rearrange them, try in different ways. And by spending the semester rearranging the equations, I could ace the exams, but I didn't do any of the homework. And so professors who had a formula, like so much percentage homework, so much percentage exams, they didn't know what to do with me exactly. And so I got low grades in some classes, although people were willing to give me letters or recommendations. But basically that informed me that as I became the person who didn't do what I was told, I wasn't following a path that people had led for me, and I wasn't going down learning the things I was supposed to learn. I was just making up my own problems and my own questions and working them out for myself. And in the end, that has some advantages, but I'm not sure that was best overall. I'm going to put that in the bragging category. What worries you most about our collective future? We are collectively ignorant compared to what we could be. We are a vast population, a vast world, a lot of smart people, very capable people. We have many great tools, and we just don't pull that together into a consensus that we can use very well. We fail to do something we could do quite easily. My work on prediction markets was one attempt to try to create an institution which would allow us to collect what we know together effectively and efficiency. And it would work if anybody was interested, but we're not very interested. And so part of my intellectual work is just try to diagnose why aren't we interested as part of the understanding how could we do better? And I think this fact that we're all trying to show off to each other as part of it and if I ask well, what's going wrong with our showing off? I would say the problem is we are showing off to audiences that are too ignorant. That is, if we focus on a really smart audience, a really knowledgeable audience, you're trying to show off to them that we would be forced to show off in better ways. So for example, we haven't talked much about it, but basically I've said medicine is mostly about showing that we care rather than helping people to get healthy. So when grandma's sick, you make sure she gets expensive medical treatment, the sort that everybody would say is the reasonable thing to do even if it's not actually very effective. But as long as your audience doesn't know it's not very effective, they will still give you credit for being caring about grandma's. If your audience knew that the medicine you were pushing hurt her instead of helping her, they would not consider you as such a caring person. So the more that our audience knows about what actually works and has what effects, the more we would all be pushed to do things that actually had good effects as as part of the process of trying to show off and show that we care. Similarly in politics actually before we move on to that same more about the mismatch in medicine. But how is it that we know or how is it that you think you know that it's more about caring than about results? So again, the structure is a set of puzzles that don't make sense from the usual point of view. So it turns out we have data on variations in health and variations in medicine and there's almost no relationship that is geographic areas that spend more on medicine or have people do more doctorate visits. Those areas are not healthier. We also even have randomized experiments where some people have been given randomly a low price for medicine and they consume more and other people have a high price and they consume less. And then there's no difference in health between these groups. So at a very basic level, there's very little if not any correlation between health and medicine. Not only that, there are other things that correlate strongly with health that people show very little interest in. There must be a lower bound to that though, because some medicine is life saving clearly right? Where are you putting the line between well, it's not a line that is there's a whole mix of medicine and some of the stuff helps and that means other stuff hurts. So if you could just get the stuff that helps and avoid the stuff that hurts why then you could do better. But people show relatively interested in doing. That. And so some medicine hurts. Not only does it do zeroid on average hurts. We are not interested in exercise air quality, but what's the measure of people not being interested in the information that would allow them to get better medicine? We have experiments and studies where people have been given access to information and asked if they would be willing to pay much for it and even just given it, and seeing if it affects the behavior. And consistently, if you give people privately information about the quality of medicine, they just aren't interested and don't act on it. And they won't pay for it. Right. Certainly won't pay for it. Exactly. So there was a study of people about to undergo heart surgery where a few percent of people undergoing heart surgery die. So that means you face a few percent risk of death. That should be a serious situation. They said, we have statistics on the local surgeons and the local hospitals in terms of what the percentage is of those patients dying there, and it varies by quite a bit, twice as much in some places than other places. Would you like this information? Only 8% were willing to pay $50, and those who were just given the information didn't act on it. What why is it that I think that everyone I know is in the 8%? Well, that's that's what they're pretending. A way to understand this is to think about Valentine's, which happened recently on Valentine's is traditional, to try to show that you care about someone by, say, buying them a box of chocolates. Now, when you do this, do you ask how hungry they are? When you think about how large a box to buy, no plausible. You need to buy as much chocolate as it takes to show you care more than somebody else, regardless of how hungry they are, which is like medicine. We just give people a lot of medicine, even though the extra medicine isn't very useful. And if you ask, well, how do I know which quality of chocolate to get? You know that you need to give a quality of chocolate a signal. That's a common signal of quality. If you happen to privately know that this is a great kind of chocolate, or they happen to privately know a certain kind of thing is a great kind of chocolate, that won't actually affect whether you interpret this as a generous act. The interpretation of generosity is based on a common signal of quality. So if medicine is a way to show that we care, that similarly what we want is common signals of quality, we aren't actually very interested in private signals of quality of medicine, which is what we actually see. All right, back to rapid fire questions. I'm taking too long. No, I've been asking follow ups as well. If you could solve just one mystery. 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